In conversation with Iftach Cohen, Co-founder and Co-director of Front-LEX

Mr. Cohen, thank you very much for accepting this invitation from the Völkerrechtsblog, which will constitute part of a Völkerrechtsblog series: The Person behind the Practitioner.

[IC] Thank you very much, Antonio, for inviting me to share my experience as an international law practitioner and strategic litigator in this refreshingly personal series.

I would like to begin this interview by briefly introducing your career to our readership. Iftach Cohen is the co-founder and co-director of Front-LEX, where he leads the organisation’s legal team in strategic litigation before the Court of Justice of the European Union involving EU institutions and agencies, including Frontex, Europol, and the European Commission.

Before founding Front-LEX, he led an innovative legal aid project in Sicily that provided legal information to asylum seekers in and around migration hotspots and served as part of an international expert team deployed by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) at the CTRPI in Rome.

Earlier in his career, while practicing in Israel and Palestine, he co-founded a law firm specialising in human rights litigation. He litigated cases concerning targeted killings in the West Bank, war crimes in Gaza, the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid, the legal status of Israeli settlements, and police violence in East Jerusalem. He also co-founded  We Are Refugees, an NGO providing pro bono legal representation to detained asylum seekers, and co-litigated the “Anti-Infiltration Law” case, in which the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously struck down legislation allowing asylum seekers to be detained without trial for three years, resulting in the release of approximately 1,500 refugees.

Mr. Cohen, your career has been marked by a longstanding commitment to defending the rights of vulnerable populations, particularly refugees and asylum seekers, regardless of their nationality or background. What first drew you to this field, and what led you to dedicate so much of your professional life to this cause?

[IC] I had just been admitted to the Israeli Bar when, together with a few colleagues, I co-founded a human-rights law office. We were young, angry, and very committed.

One of our first clients was the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). At the time, Israel had begun using a new practice against international activists working in Ramallah – Area A under the Oslo Accords, so under Palestinian control. Soldiers would enter at night, take activists literally from their beds, bring them into Israel, detain them, and then try to deport them for not having a visa to stay in Israel.

So I went to visit two clients – a Spanish activist and an Australian activist – in an Israeli detention facility. And that visit changed something in me. I came to see them, but found myself in a prison overcrowded with African asylum seekers, many of them survivors of the Sinai torture camps – people who had been trafficked, tortured and sexually abused – held far from the public eye.

In the prison garden, my two clients were the only white detainees among hundreds of African asylum seekers. People kept coming up to us, waving detention decisions written in Hebrew and asking what they meant. They could not read them or understand the procedure, and their hearings were taking place right there inside the prison, before government tribunals located in the wards.

So every time we came to visit one of our ISM clients, we ended up signing powers of attorney with several African asylum seekers on the spot and representing them pro bono. We started challenging both the legal basis of their detention and the constitutionality of these prison tribunals.

Then the Israeli Supreme Court and district courts began overturning virtually all these decisions, and dozens of our clients were soon released. That was when I understood that, for detained asylum seekers, what most often stands between them and freedom is actual pro bono legal representation – and that anything less, including legal orientation or assistance, almost always falls short. And indeed, pro bono legal representation has stood at the centre of two of my legal-aid initiatives: We Are Refugees and, now, Front-LEX.

That would make a lasting imprint on anyone’s mind, no wonder you have such a clear purpose and motivation. Strategic litigation often appears to be driven by the search for a precedent capable of improving legal protections for refugees and asylum seekers; one guesses that so many people need help, that the precedent would be a golden solution. How deliberate is this pursuit in practice? More broadly, how difficult is it to shift the law in favour of vulnerable groups through litigation?

[IC] When I vet potential legal actions, I do ask myself whether a positive outcome would serve only the individual applicant’s pursuit of justice, or whether it could also lead to judicial findings or precedents capable of bringing about wider policy change for people in a similar situation.

But to my mind, successful strategic litigation does not necessarily boil down to winning the cases you bring. In 2021, we filed the very first case against Frontex – a failure-to-act action concerning its unlawful failure to terminate its operation in the Aegean Sea.

By then, more than 15 years into Frontex’s operations, the difficulty of holding the Agency to account under the Court’s restrictive admissibility requirements was already widely discussed in academia and civil society. We were not oblivious to the fact that, under those requirements, the case was probably dead-on-arrival. But our political understanding was that the judges should be the ones telling us no, not an academic piece.

And indeed, the action was soon rejected as inadmissible. But losing that case, and the actions that followed, served a bigger purpose in our strategic litigation: exposing how a coercive EU border agency can, in a Union based on the rule of law, systematically avoid judicial review while its victims are denied access to the Court.

I believe those first losses have already moved the Court in subsequent cases. Jurisprudence can and should evolve, and in practice it does so when judges grow uncomfortable with each unjust judgment they deliver.

And indeed, years into our strategic litigation against Frontex, we have begun to see that shift. In Hamoudi, the Court took note of Frontex’s de facto legal immunity and adjusted the rules governing the burden of proof and evidence in damages actions. And in FM v Frontex, a failure-to-act action seeking to stop Frontex from sharing the locations of refugee boats with the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, the General Court rejected, for the first time, Frontex’s request to dismiss the case as inadmissible at the outset, reserving that question for the final judgment.

That is a case I would like you to dive deeper into. You recently got one of these rare achievements – a precedent- with the Hamoudi v. Frontex case before the Court of Justice of the European Union, the first legal victory in a pushback case against Frontex. What is the relevance of this case and how is it set to change for future litigation?

[IC] Alaa Hamoudi is the only pushback survivor ever to seek compensation from Frontex, and not because he is the only one harmed by a pushback operation jointly executed by Frontex and Greece in the Aegean. In 2025, the Strasbourg Court established the existence of a systematic practice of pushbacks in that region, and the evidence in our FM v Frontex case shows that an equally systematic practice of pullback operations exists in the Central Mediterranean, jointly executed by Frontex and the so-called Libyan Coast Guard.

Therefore, the relevance of this case lies in the scale of maritime pushback and pullback operations, and in the need to ensure that tens of thousands of victims every year can still have their day in Court, even if only after the harm has already been done. There are many practical reasons why Frontex victims have not brought more actions against the Agency. But what has deterred victims and their lawyers, first and foremost, has been the failure of first-instance judges to apply a proper and attainable evidentiary standard, and to obtain from Frontex any and all relevant information once the victim applicant adduces prima facie evidence of the existence and extent of the harm.

In that sense, Hamoudi is set to change future litigation by adjusting the standard and burden of proof, and by imposing on first instance judges a duty to take further steps in the proceedings, investigate pushback cases diligently, and finally provide these vulnerable applicants with effective judicial protection.

“A day in court” that seems to be at the outset of a fair judicial system. Many of the cases brought on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers seem, at their core, to concern access to justice, even where that is not the legal issue directly before the court. How important is it for asylum seekers and refugees to have their “day in court”? And what are the broader consequences when access to justice is denied?

[IC] Let’s stay with Alaa Hamoudi and see what happened to him in two different courtrooms. At first instance, his request to give oral testimony before the judges was rejected. His witness statement was given little probative value, and his inability to provide the full names of every other victim aboard the same rubber boat was held against him. Frontex, meanwhile, was not required to provide any information or evidence, or even to submit its own factual version of events.

Alaa understood that the judges were simply unwilling to provide him with the same judicial protection they might have given to others. For him, the way the case was dismissed mattered more than losing it.

By contrast, Alaa was present at the hearing before the Grand Chamber in Luxembourg, amazed and thrilled to see that the judges had mastered the case and posed so many questions. A few months later, in Mannheim, we watched together as the President read out only the operative part of the judgment, setting aside the order under appeal. Alaa was happy, sure. But only later that evening, when we read the full judgment and translated into Arabic the passages in which, this time, the judges attentively assessed his witness statement and found that he gave a detailed, coherent and credible account, then Alaa was really happy. So that is what having a “day in court” can mean for a pushback victim.

Let’s not forget, though, that Hamoudi filed a legal action for damages, which is not at all subject to admissibility criteria. Yet pushback victims stranded in Turkey who tried to protect themselves from additional pushback operations by bringing actions for failure to act or annulment faced unattainable admissibility rules, conceived to resolve disputes concerning commercial activity. They were told that their actions were inadmissible for as long as the prejudice to their situation remained less than “certain”. Their actions would become admissible only when they were already being subjected to a pushback at sea. So, as a matter of access to court, these victims would make great applicants only for damages – and only after going through the very pushback they sought to avoid.

A truly remarkable outcome, in the end, law is also about recognition and respect.

Your career as a litigator began in Israel, where you represented vulnerable populations and worked extensively on human rights issues. How would you compare that experience with your current work before the Court of Justice of the European Union? More broadly, what motivated the transition from domestic human rights litigation to strategic litigation at the European level?

[IC] As a Supreme Court litigator in Israel/Palestine, I represented Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza seeking permits to enter East Jerusalem or Israel for lifesaving medical treatment, Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of East Jerusalem fighting eviction orders, their teenagers facing persecution through the Israeli criminal system, Bedouin communities, and African asylum seekers who had crossed the Sinai desert. All were minority groups regarded as threats to the Zionist project of creating and maintaining a Jewish demographic majority. Yet the Israeli Supreme Court never rejected a single one of my cases as inadmissible. One hundred percent were admitted. You see, it was in the regime’s interest to admit them, even if only to reject them all on the merits, and in this way give itself and its legal system more legitimacy.

The shift to strategic litigation at EU level happened because of my own personal circumstances: I immigrated to Italy and had to reinvent myself, at least professionally. And I was in disbelief when I realized that, even in terms of the optics of it, it was not much of a scandal here that victims of the EU’s coercive border-control agency were systematically denied access to court.

And to me, it was a real scandal. I thought that, with my long experience litigating against the Israeli army and authorities, and with what we call in Hebrew chutzpah –audacity– I was well positioned to lead innovative and effective strategic litigation against an agency like Frontex. And we founded Front-LEX precisely for that: to end the de facto legal immunity EU institutions enjoy for their complicity in crimes against people on the move.

My final question concerns advice for young practitioners and international lawyers. People often say that lawyers may soon become obsolete, but I do not see artificial intelligence looking after the most vulnerable. What advice or tips would you give to young lawyers and scholars who want to participate in this kind of strategic litigation?

[IC] If you are here to look after the most vulnerable, I think no artificial intelligence would ever tell you to get rid of the dispositions lawyers are trained over many years of legal education and practice to acquire: the lawyer’s habitus of professional distance from the client, disengagement and depersonalization.

That would be my advice to young human-rights practitioners: reject those legal conventions. Drop the impersonal language in the courtroom. Take things personally. Use the unease and frustration building up inside you to pursue justice more effectively, together with your clients.

There are certainly other ways to litigate human-rights cases. But I think this is how you protect yourself from becoming more like the other actors in the courtroom – and give yourself a better chance of actually winning those cases.

Mr. Cohen, thank you very much for your thoughtful answers and for sharing your experience with us. I am sure many will be inspired to know your work and efforts to improve the life of so many. It has been a pleasure to have you at the Völkerrechtsblog.

[IC] The pleasure was mine. Thank you very much, dear Antonio.