European & international law Law, criminology & political science: Multidisciplinary, general & others
Author, co-author :
Raimondo, Francesca ; EDEM, Law Faculty, Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Leboeuf, Luc ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Cité ; Head of Research Group, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany ; the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Venturi, Denise ; Faculty of Law, Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium
Language :
English
Title :
Looking at the Vulnerabilities of Migrants Seeking Protection through an Intersectional Prism
Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on a New Pact on Migration and Asylum [2020] COM/2020/609.
UNGA Res 73/195 (11 January 2019) UN Doc A/RES/73/195, objective 7. Atak, I.; Nakache, D.; Guild, E. and Crépeau, F., 2018. Migrants in vulnerable situations and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper 273.
Peroni, L. and Timmer, A., 2013. Vulnerable groups: The promise of an emerging concept in European Human Rights Convention law. International Journal of Constitutional Law 11(4), pp. 1056–1085; Ippolito, F., and Sanchez S.I. (eds.). (2015). Protecting Vulnerable Groups. The European Human Rights Framework pp. 247–270. Hart Publishing, Oxford, United Kingdom; Baumgärtel, M., 2020. Facing the challenge of migratory vulnerability in the European Court of Human Rights. Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 38(1), pp. 12–29; Ippolito, F. (2020). Understanding Vulnerability in International Human Rights Law. Editoriale Scientifica, Naples, Italy.
In the EU, the newly founded EU Agency for Asylum (EUAA) has developed particular expertise in setting-up operational tools that assist the EU member states in identifying specific protection needs among asylum seekers. See EUAA’s Vulnerability Toolkit accessed 29 September 2023. See further: UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2019). Determinants of Migrant Vulnerability. accessed 29 September 2023. See also United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (2017). Migrants in vulnerable situations. UNHCR’s perspective. accessed 29 September 2023; UNHCR (2010). The Heightened Risk Identification Tool. accessed 29 September 2023.
See also the literature review in the field, made by Virokannas, E., Liuski, S., and Kurnonen, M., 2018. The contested concept of vulnerability. A literature review. European Journal of Social Work 23(2), pp. 327–339.
See, among others, Martha Fineman’s leading work: Fineman, M.A., 2008. The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition. Yale JL & Feminism 20(1). See further Fineman, M.A. (2018). Injury in the Unresponsive State: Writing the Vulnerable Subject into Neo-Liberal Legal Culture. In Bloom A., Engel D.M. and McCann M. (eds.) Injury and
Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, pp. 50–75.
Freedman, J., 2019. The uses and abuses of «vulnerability» in EU asylum and refugee protection: protecting women or reducing autonomy? Papeles del CEIC, available at accessed 30 September 2023; Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., and Sabsay, L. (2016). Vulnerability in Resistance. Duke University Press, Durham, U.S.A.
Boublil, E., 2018. The Ethics of Vulnerability and the Phenomenology of Interdependency. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 49(3), pp. 183–192; Virokannas E., Liuski S., and Kuronen M. 2018 n 5; Browne, V., Danely, J., and Rosenow, D. (eds.). (2021). Vulnerability and the Politics of Care. Transdisciplinary Dialogues. OUP, Oxford, United Kingdom. Gilson, E. (2014). The Ethics of Vulnerability: a Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice. Routledge, London, United Kingdom; Mackenzie, C. (ed.). (2013). Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. OUP, Oxford, United Kingdom. Fineman, M.A. (2013). Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in law and Politics. In Fineman, M.A. and Grear, A. (eds), Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, Ashgate, London, United Kingdom, pp. 17–19; Fineman, M.A., 2017. Vulnerability and Inevitable Inequality. 133 Oslo Law Review 4(3), pp. 1378–1380.
Cortina, A., and Conill, J. (2016). Ethics of Vulnerability. In Masferrer, A. and Garcia-Sanchez, E. (eds.). Human Dignity of the Vulnerable in the Age of Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Springer, Basel, Switzerland, pp. 45–6; Brown K., Ecclestone, K. and Emmel, N., 2017. The Many Faces of Vulnerability. Social Policy and Society 16(3), pp. 497–510; Gilodi, A.; Albert, I.; and Nienaber, B., 2022. Vulnerability in the Context of Migration: a Critical Overview and a New Conceptual Model. Human Arenas. See also the IOM model of the determinants of migrant vulnerability, which recommends combining the analysis of 1. individual factors with 2. household and family factors, 3. community factors, and 4. structural factors (IOM, 2019, n 4). See further UNHCR (2017), n 4; and UNHCR (2010), n 4.
Ajele, G. and McGill, J. (2020). ‘Intersectionality in Law and Legal Contexts’, accessed 29 September 2023. According to some authors, intersectionality also has roots in Latinas and indigenous movements (Danisi, C., Dustin, M., Ferreira, N. and Held, N., (2021), Queering asylum in Europe: Legal and social experiences of seeking international protection on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, Springer, Basel, Switzerland, pp. 68–69). On tracing the concept’s many travels, see Davis, K., 2020. Who owns intersectionality? Some reflections on feminist debates on how theories travel. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 27(2), pp. 113–127.
Crenshaw, K., 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, pp. 139–167.
Makkonen, T. (2002). Multiple, Compound and Intersectional Discrimination: Bringing the Experiences of the Most Marginalized to the Fore. Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland.
KimberléCrenshawonIntersectionality,MorethanTwoDecadesLater,8June2017, accessed 29 September 2023.
Ajele, G. and McGill, J. (2020) n 10.
See, among others, Yuval-Davis, N., 2020. Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality. Raisons Politiques 58(2), pp. 91–100.
Yuval-Davis, N., 2006. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3), pp. 193–209, p. 198.
Ibid. p. 201. See also Yuval-Davis (n 15); Anthias, F., and Yuval-Davis, N., 1983. Contextualizing feminism: Gender, ethnic and class divisions. Feminist Review 15, pp. 62–75.
Solanke, I. (2021). The EU approach to intersectional discrimination in law. In Abels, G., Krizsan, A., MacRae, H., van der Vleuten, A. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics, 1st. ed., Routledge, London, United Kingdom, p. 12.
UN CRPD (2016) General Comment No 3, Women and Girls with Disabilities; Bond, J. (2021). Intersectionality in Treaty Body Decisions. In Bond, J. Global Intersectionality and Contemporary Human Rights. OUP, Oxford, United Kingdom, p. 130; Moreno-Lax, V. (2021). Intersectionality, Forced Migration, and the Jus-generation of the Right to Flee: Theorising a Composite Entitlement to Leave to Escape Irreversible Harm. In: Çali, B., Bianku, L., and Motoc, Iulia (eds.). Migration and the European Convention on Human Rights. OUP, Oxford, United Kingdom, p. 43.
Markard, N., 2016. Persecution for reasons of membership of a particular social group: intersectionality avant la lettre? Sociologia del Diritto 2, pp. 45–63; Danisi, C., Dustin, M., Ferreira, N. and Held, N. (2021), n 10. See also UNHCR, Intersectionality and the Age, Gender and Diversity Approach, accessed 29 September 2023.
For other outputs of the VULNER project see accessed 29 September 2023.
Some of the VULNER data are available in open access. They can be consulted here accessed 29 September 2023.
UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). (2004). Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or DegradingTreatmentorPunishment(“IstanbulProtocol”)HR/P/PT/8/Rev.1.
NANSEN is a NGO that provides individual support to asylum seekers in Belgium, where it also engages in strategic litigation to uphold refugees’ rights. See accessed 1 October, 2023.
