On 26 May 2026, the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) delivered its judgment in J.B. v. Greece (no. 54796/16). The case concerns the potential removal of a Syrian national from Greece to Türkiye under the EU-Türkiye Statement of 18 March 2016, following the rejection of his asylum claim on safe third country grounds. The Court struck out the applicant’s substantive Article 3 complaint concerning his removal to Türkiye (§ 64), found no violation of Article 13 taken with Article 3 as regards the examination of his asylum claim (§ 135), and found a violation of Article 3 concerning the conditions of his detention at Mytilene police station (§ 145). While the detention finding largely follows established Article 3 case law concerning conditions in Greece, the judgment’s more significant doctrinal question concerns the Court’s treatment of assurances supporting return to Türkiye.

J.B. does not abandon the reliability inquiry developed in Othman (Abu Qatada) v. the United Kingdom (no. 8139/09, 17 January 2012). The Court expressly situates its reasoning within the reliability inquiry developed in Othman, while adapting the relevance of specificity to the institutional setting. What J.B. clarifies is how the specificity requirement within that inquiry applies where return is governed not by an ad hoc diplomatic undertaking but by a structured framework of cooperation between two Convention States, accompanied by clear and objectively verifiable conditions: in such circumstances, the requirement that assurances be specific cannot be applied mechanically and general assurances, assessed in the context of that framework, may suffice, provided the evidence shows they operate effectively in practice and are not undermined by systemic deficiencies. The judgment does not, however, specify what that evidentiary showing requires. The Court’s silence on this point is significant since the same framework examined in J.B. had, by the time of judgment, ceased to operate in the manner relevant to readmission.

Othman‘s individual-assurance model

To see how far J.B. departs from that inquiry, it is worth setting out what Othman itself required. Othman established a multi-factor approach to assessing diplomatic assurances, encompassing not only the terms and specificity of the undertaking but also the authority issuing it, the receiving State’s record of compliance, monitoring and verification mechanisms, its system of protection against torture, and domestic judicial scrutiny (§ 189). The Court therefore did not assess assurances in isolation. But these surrounding circumstances principally served to establish whether the individual undertaking could be regarded as reliable. Specificity (factor ii) was particularly important because the Court was examining whether the receiving State had made a sufficiently concrete commitment capable of protecting the particular applicant against the identified risk. These surrounding circumstances, the issuing authority, the receiving State’s compliance record, the existence of monitoring mechanisms, strengthened or weakened the reliability of that undertaking; they did not themselves replace the undertaking as the central object of scrutiny.

From H.T. v. Germany and Greece to J.B. v. Greece: what determines the failure or success of a cooperation framework

However, J.B. is not the first case in which the Court considered assurances formulated within an institutional framework. In J.B., the Court expressly recalled that, in H.T. v. Germany and Greece (no. 13337/19, 15 October 2024) it had declined to exclude the possibility that an arrangement between two States containing general assurances might be acceptable under certain conditions (§ 129, citing H.T., § 146). In H.T., the Court found that Germany had failed to discharge its procedural obligation under Article 3 because the administrative arrangement it relied on to remove the applicant to Greece contained no provisions guaranteeing access to an effective asylum procedure there (§ 146; violation by Germany, § 151). Institutional form, without more, did not discharge the sending State’s obligations. J.B. appears to be the first case in which the Court accepted that such an institutional arrangement could satisfy the relevant reliability inquiry.

Read together, the two judgments establish a progression from Othman. Othman defines the protective function an assurance must perform. H.T. demonstrates that an institutional arrangement does not automatically perform that function merely by existing. J.B. identifies circumstances in which it can. The Court has not created a separate legal test for institutionalised returns; it has expanded the range of evidence from which reliability, in the Othman sense, may be inferred. That expansion is nevertheless doctrinally significant because it changes the practical object of the applicant’s challenge. Under Othman, the applicant contests the reliability of a specific promise. Under J.B., the challenge may have to address the cooperative architecture through which reliability is inferred, creating a more diffuse evidentiary target even where the formal protective guarantee is no weaker.

The missing threshold

Because the applicant’s practical target has become more diffuse in this way, it matters all the more that the Court specify what a successful showing of institutional reliability actually requires. On this point, the Court is only partly explicit: it states that the decisive question is whether the assurances, viewed in light of the overall scheme and the material before it, offer a sufficiently reliable guarantee of protection (§ 129). It is equally explicit that assurances are never sufficient in themselves and their practical application must be examined (§ 129, citing Saadi v. Italy, § 148), and the Court’s task remains confined to assessing whether the assurances obtained in the particular case are sufficient to remove the real risk (§ 129, citing Othman, § 186). Read together, these formulations imply that the decision-maker must examine whether the agreed safeguards operate effectively in practice and whether systemic deficiencies undermine them. What it does not do is specify how that evidentiary showing is to be made. In the present case, the domestic authorities did not rely on the Turkish assurances in isolation but assessed them together with the EU-Türkiye Statement and further objective material, including statistical data and reports and letters from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) (§ 130). However the Court did not indicate whether these considerations are cumulative, whether any one is indispensable, or whether they function merely as indicators from which reliability may be inferred rather than as independent requirements.

• 129’s own formulations, that assurances must “operate effectively in practice” and be “not undermined by systemic deficiencies”, restate the ultimate standard rather than naming what to look at in order to meet it. This is not the same as Othman’s approach, which is unranked but still enumerates the categories of evidence relevant to the assessment: the issuing authority’s reliability, the existence of monitoring mechanisms, the receiving State’s compliance record. The material actually canvassed in J.B., the Statement’s provisions, ECRE and UNHCR correspondence, statistical data (§ 130), reads as a narration of what happened to be in this case’s file, not a framework offered for future application. The objection is not that the Court should have converted its holistic assessment into a rigid checklist. Othman itself does not rank its factors mechanically. However, a holistic inquiry can still identify the types of evidence relevant to the conclusion.

The practical importance of that omission becomes apparent when the subsequent operation of the framework is considered. The very framework J.B. examined had, by the time of judgment, already ceased to operate as the Court described it: Türkiye had suspended readmissions under the EU-Türkiye Statement since March 2020 (a suspension that postdates the period covered by J.B.‘s own assessment (§ 50)). The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) confronted an analogous divergence in Elliniko Symvoulio gia tous Prosfyges (Case C-134/23, EU:C:2024:838), concerning Greece’s continued designation of Türkiye as a safe third country despite the suspension. The Court did not treat the suspension as necessarily invalidating the designation itself. It held, however, that where Türkiye did not in fact admit or readmit the applicants concerned, Greece could not reject their applications as inadmissible under Article 33(2)(c) of Directive 2013/32; it had to examine them individually and without unjustified delay (§ 54). The judgment thus distinguishes formal institutional status from operative reality. It offers a narrower response than a freestanding continuity requirement: the general designation remains intact, while the practical check is relocated to the individual decision. The CJEU therefore does not establish continuity as a separate threshold, but it illustrates why formal validity cannot substitute for evidence of current operation.

Conclusion

J.B. does not lower the protection Othman established. It clarifies that the specificity Othman requires can, in an institutional-cooperation setting, be established through the framework and the evidence of its operation rather than through an individualised undertaking. This is the progression traced above from Othman through H.T. Institutionalised return arrangements, EU readmission agreements and comparable bilateral frameworks among them, are common, and J.B.’s reasoning could have significance beyond the EU–Türkiye context. The gap is not that the Court failed to examine whether the framework operated effectively: it did so and found that it did at the material time in 2016. The gap is that the judgment gives no account of what evidence supported that finding, whether the material canvassed in § 130 was sufficient because it was comprehensive, or merely because nothing before the Court contradicted it. The CJEU’s judgment, which the Court cites, shows why that omission matters: the same framework later ceased to function in the manner relevant to readmission. J.B. does not say what should happen when that gap between architecture and operation is shown to exist, because it did not have to say so on its own facts. The next case that relies on an institutional framework whose operation is genuinely in dispute will have to answer that question with less guidance from Othman’s successors than the language of § 129 might suggest.