In European human rights law, it is taken for granted that states have the sovereign right to regulate migration. A right to be admitted to a country of which one is not a national, or a right not to be expelled, exists only in exceptional cases. In the words of the European Court of Human Rights »as a matter of well-established international law and subject to its treaty obligations, a State has the right to control the entry of non-nationals into its territory« (Abdulaziz, Cabales & Balkandali v UK, para. 67). This means that, in the sphere of migration, the starting point is not the right of the individual but the right of states. Instead of states having to justify an interference with the right of an individual, it is the individual who has to justify their »interference« with the right of the state to control migration.

Migration is the only field in which the usual structure of rights is abandoned. This »Strasbourg reversal”((Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, When Humans Become Migrants. Study of the European Court of Human Rights with an Inter-American Counter-Point, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015; comp. Bas Schotel, On the Right of Exclusion. Law, Ethics and Immigration Policy, London: Routledge 2012.)) cannot be explained by the fact that migration is not contained in the European Convention of Human Rights; the environment is not mentioned either, but in environmental human rights cases the usual structure (the state has to justify its infringement with an individual right) is maintained. Thym has posited in this context that there is a fundamental »sedentarist« assumption at work here.((Daniel Thym, ›Migrationsfolgenrecht‹, Veröffentlichungen der Vereinigung der Deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer 76 (2017), 169-210.)) This sedentarist assumption is not merely a standard invocation; in Strasbourg case law, it does a lot of work. For example, the Court has justified recent restrictive judgments with reference to this assumption (i.a. M.N. and Others v Belgium, para. 124; N.D. and N.T. v Spain, para. 167; Ilias and Ahmed v Hungary, para. 213).

Evidently, if European states have »the right to control the entry of non-nationals«, then all states have this right. However, states may be formally equal, but in actuality states are unequal, also when it comes to human mobility. This inequality is visualized in this map. Nationals of countries that are white on this map need entry visas for less than 100 countries. Nationals of countries that are grey on the map need entry visa for more than 100 countries.