Drawing on European and comparative jurisprudence and reports, this book review synthesises minimal legal standards and discretionary policies aiming to mitigate vulnerability and promote integration among asylum seekers, refugees and beneficiaries of international protection. It also highlights some of the gaps and inconsistencies that remain to be resolved for the Common European Asylum System to adequately protect the human rights of persons subjected to multiple, intersectional factors of vulnerability.

This article enquires into states’ obligations to provide remedies for domestic violence when the right-claimants are in a context of precarious, insecure or irregular migration status (“migration status precarity”). Through an exploration of the laws and policies in place in two case studies, Ireland and Spain, this article questions the role of law in ensuring that barriers posed by migration statuses do not hamper women’s access to remedies for intimate partner violence. This article posits that, in the case studies examined, (...) the criminalisation of domestic violence and coercive control does not automatically serve as an avenue to remedies when it intersects with migration status. Rather, it can be a tool of (negative) regulation of women’s right to live a life free from gender-based violence. It argues that the states’ lack of remedying an unequal access to remedies due to hurdles posed by migration statuses creates distinct categories of more or less deserving victims/survivors depending on their citizenship and migration statuses. Received: 24 June 2021 Accepted: 22 February 2022. (shrink)

In the course of the comparatively high numbers of refugees arriving in Europe in 2015 and 2016, several practices of the European border regime became more restrictive. This development accounts for the precarious situation in refugee camps at the external borders of Southeast Europe and the refusal of Mediterranean countries to accept more asylum seekers –against the backdrop of a lacking European solidarity system. Literature suggests that refugees in these contexts find themselves more often in (what Agamben understands as) a (...) bare life situation, which challenges the possibilities for refugee agency at the European borders. This paper reflects on two concrete cases interpreted as bare life situations based on field research in Greece and Italy. It explores conceptualizations considering an assumed change of refugee agency. The first case refers to the situation in former camp “Moria” and the second to practices of irregularization in Southern Italy. The article aims to specify the limitations of refugees’ agency by building on an understanding of agency as relational to the border regime. The findings suggest that the bare life refugees have been reduced to explains the development of new forms of voice in refugee camps and strategies of imperceptibility in irregularity. Thereby refugee acts expose the adversity of border practices, while appropriating and redefining the bare life conditions. Received: 14 February 2022 Accepted: 06 May 2022. (shrink)