RE-EVALUATING VULNERABILITY IN THE COMMON EUROPEAN ASYLUM SYSTEM: TOWARDS A MORE SENSITIVE AND EFFECTIVE IDENTIFICATION AND ASSESSMENT APPROACH FOR VULNERABLE ASYLUM SEEKERS.

This thesis re-examines the place and function of vulnerability in the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), where the concept has become increasingly central yet remains theoretically fragile and operationally inconsistent. Although European Union (EU) legislation and European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) guidance invoke vulnerability as a basis for special reception and procedural safeguards, they continue to rely predominantly on categorical indicators—such as age, disability, unaccompanied status, or SOGIESC (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics). This approach obscures intersectional harms, reinforces reductive assumptions, and often generates new vulnerabilities through administrative design, evidentiary expectations, reception arrangements, and externalised procedures. To address these shortcomings, the thesis develops a conceptual-legal framework that conceptualises vulnerability as layered, intersectional, and mediated by law. Drawing on feminist ethics, legal philosophy, socio-legal scholarship, and the work of Fineman, Butler, Mackenzie, Luna, Gilodi, and Moreno-Lax & Vavoula, the thesis reconceptualises vulnerability as: (i) universal yet unevenly distributed; (ii) dynamic and relational across structural, situational, relational, and experiential layers; and (iii) shaped—and sometimes produced—by legal categories, institutional practices, and procedural environments. Intersectionality is employed as a multi-level methodological tool (inter-, intra-, and anti-categorical) to uncover internal diversity within groups, analyse systemic patterns across groups, and interrogate the categories through which CEAS governs protection. Empirically, the framework is grounded in insights from the Vulnerability Under the Global Protection Regime (VULNER) project, a multi-country empirical study on vulnerability in migration and asylum, which illuminate how vulnerability is identified, overlooked, or created within asylum systems and how credibility, trauma, stigma, and positionality shape applicants’ interactions with institutions. Doctrinally, the framework is applied to CEAS legislation—including the 2024 CEAS reform package, EUAA soft-law tools, and the externalisation practices that increasingly structure European asylum governance. Its practical value is illustrated through analytically constructed case analyses drawing on recurring patterns documented in VULNER project, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guidance, and intersectional scholarship. The thesis argues for a continuum model of vulnerability, designed for periodic reassessment, and calls for embedding layered, intersectional reasoning into CEAS identification and assessment mechanisms, procedures, and accountability structures, both within EU territory and in externalised settings. In doing so, it outlines a pathway toward a more conceptually coherent, normatively grounded, and operationally responsive approach to vulnerability in European asylum governance.