Briddick, ‘Violence against Women and Regimes of Exception: Undoing Discrimination in Migration Law’, 2025

Briddick, Catherine, Violence against Women and Regimes of Exception: Undoing Discrimination in Migration Law (Oxford, 2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, 28 July 2025)

Abstract

This book analyses migration law’s treatment of women. It identifies patterns of disadvantage, scrutinises justifications for differential treatment, and argues for migration status reform. It conceptualises and then delineates obligations in relation to violence against women. Centrally, it brings together a series of distinct responses to violence experienced in the context of migration control and offers a new framework for their evaluation. To do so, it integrates doctrinal, empirical, and theoretical material to understand the difference that migration status makes to an experience of violence and to establish how the resulting compounded disadvantage should be remedied. The analysis starts in the UK and with the European Convention on Human Rights, broadening to connect with European Union law and the Council of Europe’s Trafficking and Istanbul Conventions. This approach provides valuable insights into the role and ability of national courts, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Court of Justice of the European Union to scrutinise different forms of discriminatory treatment. While this book focuses on rules and regimes in the UK and Europe, its arguments can be applied in a broader range of jurisdictions and contexts. Consonant with the feminist jurisprudence and approaches to international law with which it engages, the book is structured around the legal challenges that migrant women have brought to the rules that determine their status.