Children, young people and families in appellate asylum proceedings in Belgium: a legal ethnography

Description: This project takes an interdisciplinary, contextualised and multi-actor approach to analyse how key stakeholders involved in the adjudication of Belgian asylum cases in appeal perceive, mobilise and practice children’s rights. Research methods from law (case law analysis) and anthropology (ethnography) will be combined to study the role and perspective of children and young people, their parents or guardians, lawyers, and judges from the Council for Alien Law Litigation (CALL). Research questions: (1) how do individuals experience and understand children’s rights (perceive); (2) to what extent do they define relevant problems in terms of children’s rights (mobilise); and (3) which norms and practices shape the internal legal culture by which the CALL operates (practice)? The project contributes to the field of ‘critical children’s rights studies’.
Website research project: https://hrc.ugent.be/research/childrens-rights-in-asylum-proceedings/
Promoter(s): Ellen Desmet
Researcher(s): Sara Lembrechts
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Law and Criminology
Period of time: 2020 - 2024