Child migration and the construction of vulnerability (original) (raw)
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CCJHR Working Papers Series, 2018
Recent developments in the European Union (EU) policy on the management of migratory flows, including the adoption of the so-called “hotspot approach” in Italy and Greece, have resulted in the implementation of a strategy that is increasingly and, it is argued, almost exclusively security-based. The inability or unwillingness to build mechanisms that, without setting aside the legitimate interests of the EU and its Member States, would have ensured appropriate human rights safeguards, as well as respect for international legal obligations, has had massive effects on the safety and well-being of migrants and of society as a whole. The implementation of a security-based policy has had a particularly significant impact on vulnerable categories of migrants, including victims of human trafficking. In fact, and despite the fact that connections between human rights and the fight against trafficking are multiple and well-established, States have consistently chosen to deal with trafficking as an immigration issue or as a matter of crime or public order. Victims of human trafficking are nonetheless still entitled to the full range of human rights but, in order to access those rights and therefore protection, a key aspect is the process of identification, which ought to be performed as soon as possible including in the context of the hotspots. The “hotspot approach” in its present form, deeply entrenched in the so-called Dublin system, however, cannot be considered in line with a human rights-based approach, and the broader security-based policy that has been implemented at European and national level has undermined the availability and accessibility of protection mechanisms for victims of human trafficking.
Frontiers in human dynamics, 2022
The article discusses the role of "vulnerability" in the legal and political discourse of today's Europe as a dual-mode dispositive. On the one hand, "vulnerability" allows the legal formalism to incorporate the precarious subjects that the traditional language of "rights" risks to exclude. Compared with the human rights language, "vulnerability" better articulates the relationship between legal categories and rapidly changing social and ecological landscapes. The "vulnerability language" captures intersectionality. On the other hand, however, through examples taken from the EU normative production on irregular and mixed migrations, with a focus on refugee "screening" and reception and on managing identification and referral procedures of persons victims of human trafficking, this article shows that the assignment of an individual to a "vulnerable group" has the effect not only of expanding and intensifying their protection under normative human rights regimes, but also of accentuating some risks already inherent in human rights discourse, namely paternalism and essentialism. Paradoxically, a possible outcome can be fragmentation of rights protection frameworks, and exclusion. Vulnerable migrants may have to face additional challenges stemming from their inability (coupled with objective difficulty) to decodify communications and instructions concerning their status. Divergent ways of conceiving vulnerability, depending on subjective assessments, public policy standards, the legal framework, and the political agenda on welfare, contribute to neutralizing the potentially emancipatory impact of the vulnerability language.
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Abstract: This paper examines human trafficking within the European Union and questions how to provide international protection to victims of human trafficking in the EU. The focus of this paper is on the situation of victims who face deportation from the European Union: non-EU citizens who are trafficked into the EU. The core of this thesis is the research question: what mechanisms can be developed within, or to complement, the common European asylum system to provide assistance and protection to victims of human trafficking who want assistance but face deportation from the EU? The argument is maintained that victims of human trafficking are in need of international protection and must not be deported nor forced to return to their country of origin. First, the thesis examines the possibility of affording victims of human trafficking in the EU the right to asylum under the common European asylum system. This paper then concludes that asylum is not an appropriate institutional response for victims of human trafficking, and posits that internal coherence to providing assistance and protection to victims of human trafficking within the European Union could be created through the establishment of a common European temporary residence permit system for victims of human trafficking, complementing the common European asylum system.
Moving children? Child trafficking, child migration, and child rights
Critical Social Policy, 2011
This article aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarly work that critically deconstructs dominant discourse on ‘trafficking’ and to the literature that documents and theorizes the gap between states’ spoken commitment to children’s rights and the lived experience of migrant children in the contemporary world. It contrasts the intense public and policy concern with the suffering of ‘trafficked’ children against the relative lack of interest in other ways that migrant children can suffer, in particular, suffering resulting from immigration policy and its enforcement. It argues that discourse on ‘child trafficking’ operates to produce and maintain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively a child. These conceptions of the normative child then inform policy and practice that often punishes, rather than protects, children who do not conform to the imagined norm, and that simultaneously reinforces children’s existing vulnerabilities and creates new ones.
Giovanna Gnerre Landini (ed), CHILDREN IN ARMED CONFLICT: HOW CAN THEY BE PROTECTED IN A MULTILEVEL INTERNATIONAL FRAMEWORK?, Gambini Editor, 2024
Children displaced during an armed conflict are at a high risk of being trafficked for various exploitative purposes or might end up in the hands of ruthless smugglers of migrants. The aim of this brief study is to understand if transnational human trafficking and smuggling of migrants’ standards existing at the universal level, i.e. the two Additional Protocols to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, in Particular Women and Children, and Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, Supple- menting the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, are adequate supplementary standards to guarantee the protection of children escaping from the violence of armed conflicts. While their importance is certainly to be acknowledged, their implemen- tation is to be promoted side by side with the one of a combination of international norms existing inter alia in the areas of interna- tional humanitarian law, international human rights law, and in- ternational refugee law. Therefore, while the relevance of these branches of international law in a vision of complementarity is fully recognized in this study, the focus is only on understanding the (limited) added value of the two above-mentioned treaties in- cluded in transnational criminal law.
Kathmandu School of Law Review, 2012
The proliferation of transnational crimes has made protection of victims of trafficking all the more imperative. However, as the general definition of a victim is hazed by surfacing mixed migratory patterns, legal frameworks on their protection have become unaccommodating to some victims. The role of refugee legal framework in such circumstances for added and/or supplementary protection of such victims is very consequential and the nexus between these areas is not uncanny. Whether be it the vulnerability of refugees to be trafficked or the legitimate claim of victims of trafficking on voluntary repatriation or non-refoulement that gives rise to asylum claim, adducing refugee legal framework has become essential. There needs to be burden-sharing arrangements among the countries of origin, transit and destination and concerned agencies such as UNHCR and IOM to provide utmost legal assistance to the victims of trafficking. The obligation to protect demands states to refrain from treati...
The European Union and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings
2017
The establishment of the Trafficking1 and the Smuggling Protocol2 has brought to the surface the importance of the concept of vulnerability. However, the Protocols have not given a precise definition to the concept of vulnerability, in order to perceive a practical application on legal grounds. In 2005, the Council of Europe tries to delimit the definition’s gap of such concept, through the Convention of Warsaw3, giving a more exact definition of the concept. The present article intends to analyse the evolution and the application of this concept on the international legal framework on Human trafficking and Smuggling of migrants.