In Access to Courts for Asylum Seekers and Refugees, Emma Dunlop focuses on the scope and content of article 16 of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Under this article, States are obligated to provide asylum seekers and refugees with access to courts. This obligation entails a requirement to ensure 'effective' access, which may call for accommodations to be made to address individual vulnerabilities -where, for example, a person does not speak the language of the court or lacks easy access to a lawyer. It also guarantees additional rights to those who have attained 'habitual residence' in the host country. Access to courts is a critical gateway right, the denial of which can prevent a person from defending other rights under domestic law. Yet, until now, article 16 has not received extensive scrutiny. In the first dedicated monograph on article 16 of the 1951 Convention, Dunlop positions the article within the broader context of international human rights law, customary international law, a
"In most English-speaking countries, including Canada, 'black letter law'--text-based, firmly entrenched law--is the legal standard upon which judicial decisions are made. Within this tradition, court
