re:constitution
2019/ 2020

Martin Joormann

Mobility Phase: University of Copenhagen - Centre for European and Comparative Legal Studies

The Protection of Asylum-Seeking Families: National Migration Policies, Common European Asylum System and International Refugee Law

Photo: Joanna Scheffel

Martin Joormann is a PhD in Sociology of Law. His thesis, entitled “Legitimized Refugees” (supervisor Reza Banakar, defended 3 May 2019), has been published by Lund University. To summarize it very briefly, the thesis investigates the question of how the Swedish migration bureaucracy’s highest legal instance, the Migration Court of Appeal, legitimizes decisions that affect the lives of asylum seekers. Based on critical discourse analysis of precedents and informed by semi-structured interviews with judges, it illustrates the textual construction of last-instance decisions that concern families with children; class, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality; and the policy of ‘regulated immigration’. During his employment (2014-2019) as Doctoral Candidate at Lund – of which he spent six months on a scholarship as Visiting PhD Candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford – Martin has been working in both research and teaching at Lund’s Department of Sociology of Law. Moreover, since 2018, he has been co-editing (together with Dalia Abdelhady and Nina Gren) a book, preliminary title “Northern Encounters: Refugees and the Violence of European Welfare States”, for Lund’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. This edited volume is scheduled to be published with Manchester University Press in 2020.

The Protection of Asylum-Seeking Families: National Migration Policies, Common European Asylum System and International Refugee Law

For the 2019-2020 re:constitution Fellowship for Younger Scholars and Practitioners of Law, my intention to publish two journal articles is built on the idea to develop the analyses that emerged from two empirical chapters of my PhD thesis. Both of these chapters rely on the critical reading of two sources of data, namely precedents published by Sweden’s Migration Court of Appeal (hereafter MCA) and the interviews I conducted with Swedish migration court judges. Both chapters discuss legal decision-making that affects the lives of asylum-seeking families. The first focuses on children and the second on parents. For these discussions, national migration policies, the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the current ‘Dublin Regulation’ (EU Regulation No. 604/2013) and international refugee law with its roots in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention are of crucial importance. In brief, the two planned journal articles will investigate:

a) the central problem of tensions between the democratic legitimation of national migration control and supra-national regulations of seeking refugee protection

b) the guiding question of how legal certainty and the rule of law are constructed at these intersections of democracy and national, European as well as international regulations.