Reinforcing or obscuring refugee rights? The roles of vulnerability in Norwegian asylum practices

This chapter discusses the ambivalent status of ‘vulnerability’ in the human rights discourse dominating the Norwegian asylum regime and welfare practices involving protection seekers. On the one hand, vulnerability factors are addressed through accommodations in reception and asylum procedures, and they implicitly inform the substantive assessment of the refugee claim. In other words, the concept of vulnerability helps calibrate the interpretation and implementation of human rights norms to secure procedural justice and contextualized assessments of risk. On the other hand, migrant vulnerability is sometimes positioned in opposition to refugee rights, as something to be considered on a humanitarian, and therefore discretionary, basis. We discuss the implications of this ambivalence for affected migrants and how vulnerabilities are further shaped by increasingly strict immigration policies even after a person’s protection needs have been recognized.