PROME’s findings show that migrant rights in Europe are constrained by structural dynamics that go beyond individual cases. A first major finding concerns civic stratification: states create a hierarchy of migrant categories (e.g., refugees, temporary-protection holders, irregular migrants, family migrants, stateless persons), each with its own set of rights and restrictions. This stratified architecture profoundly shapes how human rights courts assess migrant claims. Even when applying the same human rights standards, they inevitably reproduce these unequal structures, making full equality before the law structurally impossible to achieve. This insight explains why certain rights (such as Article 3 ECHR) are consistently protected, whereas others (like family life, procedural guarantees, or non-discrimination) vary widely across cases.
A second key finding concerns the legal invisibility of xenophobia. Although hostility toward migrants is widely recognised in public debate, courts, including the ECtHR, rarely treat xenophobia as a legally relevant motive. PROME demonstrates that an animus-based approach could allow courts to recognise discriminatory intent without requiring an entirely new protected ground under Article 14 ECHR. A third strand of findings comes from PROME’s empirical work on Greek hotspot cases, revealing patterns of “asystemic” jurisprudence: courts evaluate individual cases while avoiding the structural nature of recurring violations, leading to inconsistent and sometimes contradictory outcomes. Finally, the project highlights how national security reasoning allows governments to justify severe interferences with migrant rights, even where domestic systems lack basic safeguards against arbitrariness — a problem documented repeatedly in Bulgarian cases. Together, these findings expose the continuous need to question the willingness, and especially the capacity of the ECtHR, to uphold the human rights of migrants on a consistent basis. Legal analyses need to be recalibrated based on the adjusted expectations that derive from these findings.