Jessica Klüger, LL.M.

Jessica Klüger is a Research Associate in the MeDiMi project “Who is Empowered by Strasbourg? Migrants and States before the ECtHR”. She is a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law) and Justus Liebig University Giessen (co-tutelle). In her research, she addresses the litigation of governments at the European Convention System concerning the two sole rights exclusively designed to protect migrants, both from expulsion practices (Article 4 of Protocol 4 and Article 1 of Protocol 7). She investigates to what extent and how governments shape the jurisprudence of these case laws over time. Jessica Klüger has studied Law in Brazil. After completing a Bachelor of Laws at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, she worked as a lawyer for law firms and non-governmental organisations. In 2020, she published her first scientific article, “New Refuge: Prima Facie Recognition as an Instrument of Transformation. Brazil Venezuela Case”. She was awarded two full scholarships for a Master of Laws in the Netherlands. She decided to pursue the master’s program on Public International Law with a specialisation in human rights at Utrecht University. Her master’s thesis addressed the topic of “Pushback Practices at the European Borders: Procedural Instruments of the European Court of Human Rights to Addressing Wrongful Policies”. In 2023, she published an article entitled “Carving out a Right to Expel at the ECtHR” and, in 2025, “The Collective Expulsion Case Law: An exception to the Strasbourg Reversal Approach to Migration-Related Cases?”. In the same year, she published a blog post in EJIL, “What is the Future of the Prohibition Against Collective Expulsion in the European Human Rights Legal Framework?” Jessica was also a lecturer for the bachelor’s courses “Fundamental Rights in Europe” and “Global Migration Governance” and co-supervised master’s thesis. Within MeDiMi, she served as a representative of the Research Associates on the Steering Committee. She assisted in establishing the Section “Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies” at the Giessen Graduate Centre for Social Sciences, Business, Economics, and Law (GGS). Her research interests lie in International Human Rights Law, the European Court of Human Rights, as well as migration and refugee law.

Contact: j.klueger@vu.nl