13 February 2020
Bilbao Campus
This seminar brought together renowned researchers and experts in migration and asylum from the areas of Constitutional Law, International Law, Philosophy of Law and from the fields of Psychology, Social Education and Sociology from the University of Barcelona, the Complutense University of Madrid, the University of Almeria, the Rovira i Virgili University, the University of Oviedo, the Comillas Pontifical University and the University of the Basque Country.
Situations of vulnerability in long and short-term global migration scenarios, far from being exceptional, are going to become more frequent and require all legal operators, institutions and academics to face emerging legal challenges in order to achieve a more individualised and contextualised determination of the causes underlying the specific vulnerability factor. Different international fora and agencies, such as the UNHCR, the UN and the European Union, are calling for the adoption of a new global strategy of action involving a greater social and legal commitment to meet the special and specific needs of human mobility, especially those who are in a vulnerable situation.
To this end, the main themes of the seminar were the theoretical and political criticism of the concept of vulnerability, the legal framework for protection and its scope in jurisprudence not only for certain "vulnerable groups" but also in cases of situational or intersectional vulnerability. F inally, different social and academic agents contrasted the need for individualised processes derived from vulnerability in the reception-integration processes, in conjunction with pioneering initiatives such as the Auzolana Programme or the Goihabe Programme of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, whose report was drafted by some members of the HARRERA team of the Pedro Arrupe Human Rights Institute.
