The Governance of 'Vulnerable' Migrants, or how Material Conditions Determine Fundamental Rights

The last few years, the philosophical and the legal meaning of ‘vulnerability’, the advantages and the pitfalls of the concept have been intensively discussed by human rights scholars. This article aims to contribute to these reflections by exploring how vulnerability is understood, appropriated and translated into procedural regulations and actual bureaucratic practices based on two case-studies: the reception of asylum seekers in Belgium, on the one hand, and reception of asylum seekers and provision of aid services in the humanitarian operation in Uganda on the other. Those two cases will help demonstrate that ‘vulnerable groups’ and the corresponding procedural and substantial safeguards or protections are often defined in a flexible manner, depending on the resources available to public institutions on the one hand, and on specific agency guidelines and definitions of ‘vulnerable’ status on the other. Our ethnographic data show that civil servants assess ‘vulnerability’ based on internally defined categories, the exact borders of which are contingent upon migration flows, state budgets, civil servants’ emotions and organizational concerns. Bound between the will to help and obligation to follow state policies, reception bureaucrats either break administrative guidelines, use their own resources in order to make up for the shortcomings of their institution, or massively decline migrant’s requests hoping to demonstrate the absurdity of current reception policies.