Reintroducing the Vulnerability of Asylum Seekers into the Examination of Their Asylum Application. an Ethnography of the Legal Work Carried out By Volunteers in an Association Involved in the Reception and Legal Assistance of Migrants

This paper examines the role of associative actors in investigating access to migrants' rights through an ethnography of a legal office set up to guarantee access to rights for asylum-seekers in France since 2016. In the face of a more and more restrictive French and European policy on migrants, especially in the context of the Dublin III directive, the volunteers of a legal assistance service are trying to resist, not to say to fight, the reintroduction of physical and mental vulnerability into the examination of their asylum claims. According to the European Dublin Regulation, the administrative authority to which an application for international protection is referred must send the foreign national back to the first member state through which they passed after leaving their country of origin. They become the object of a game of Ping-Pong between European countries, to the extent that they define themselves by the name of the legal procedure to which they are submitted: I'm Dublin. We will show how the volunteers took advantage of an article of the regulation, which allows a State to ‘depart from the criteria of responsibility, in particular for humanitarian reasons’, to use and turn the regulation against the administration. The aim is to examine how the legal work carried out by volunteers contributes to access to and the examination of asylum applications and to reintroduce the consideration of their vulnerability. The results show how a double struggle is being waged: the guarantee of access to asylum rights and access to health care, through support work that is aimed at the reintroduction of the bodies of exiles and their vulnerability to the authorities, and at the exiles themselves.