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Invisible Struggles: Migrant Women, Everyday Vulnerability and EU Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2026

Narin Nosrati Open the ORCID record for Narin Nosrati [Opens in a new window]
Narin Nosrati*
Affiliation:
Law, University of Munich (LMU), Germany
*
Email: narin.nosrati@jura.uni-muenchen.de
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Abstract

In this contribution, the author develops a feminist account of an EU Law of the everyday by examining how European migration and labour law structurally produce the invisibility of migrant women. Drawing on the story of Nazneen, an Afghan migrant featured in Ben Judah’s This is Europe, the author argues that her experiences of restricted mobility, informal labour, and gender-based vulnerability are not marginal to the law but shaped by it. The analysis shows how legal regimes, particularly the Common European Asylum System and labour markets structures, generate “everyday borders” and sustain precarious forms of work on which sectors of the European economy depend. These regimes operate through a logic of selective visibility. They recognise certain individuals as having rights while rendering others legally and institutionally invisible. This is further reinforced by the gender-blindness of asylum and labour law, which fails to account for the specific risks women face on migration routes. By proposing a feminist approach to the law of the everyday, this paper calls for a reorientation of EU law away from abstract, market-oriented subjectivities and towards the lived experiences of those on the margins of society. Such a reorientation exposes the extent to which European legal and economic orders rely on, and reproduce, the invisibility of vulnerable individuals.

Keywords

EU asylum lawintersectionallegal invisibilityfeminist legal theoryEuropean societygender equality

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Type
Dialogue and debate: Symposium
Information
European Law Open , First View , pp. 1 - 10
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press

1. Introduction

The everyday is not universal: some everyday lives are structured by precarity, exploitation and exclusion. Migrants, particularly migrant women, experience an everyday that remains largely invisible to many in Europe, even within dominant legal frameworks. This legal invisibility functions not as a gap or oversight, but as a systemic feature of European migration and labour law. Using the story of Nazneen, a migrant Afghan woman portrayed in the chapter ‘Evia’ of Ben Judah’s book This is Europe: The Way We Live Now,Footnote 1 this article sheds light on how legal regimes in Europe produce invisibility at the intersection of migration, labour and gender. Nazneen’s experiences of restricted movement, informal employment, gender-based risks and institutional abandonment do not fall outside the law; they are shaped by it. Her struggle is a product of how law is structured to recognise certain subjects and exclude others. This raises the question of whose lives law recognises and protects, and whose it ignores.

In its legal imagination, Europe is a space of ordered mobility, protected labour and human rights, which offers its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice. But Nazneen’s reality is taking place in a parallel Europe, as her story reveals. It is a Europe built on containment, invisibility and precarious survival for those who do not fit into legal categories. European Union (EU) law continues to conceptualise legal subjects in abstract, neutral and individualist terms, disregarding the unequal ways in which its effects are distributed across lines of gender, race and class. Nazneen’s story therefore amplifies the crucial need for a rethinking of how we approach law itself.

While working on this project, I found myself torn between two possible goals: seeking visibility for the invisible within prevailing frameworks or overcoming the politics of recognition, as they always bear a risk of invisibility for certain individuals.Footnote 2 In that sense, Martha A. Fineman’s vulnerability approachFootnote 3 has the potential to encourage a more inclusive way of thinking beyond existing categories. In the sections that follow, I turn to Nazneen’s story to trace the specific mechanisms of invisibility in migration and labour law, highlight the gender dimension that runs throughout the story and question the priorities that exist within the European legal order. I then explore Fineman’s approach, which begins with shared human vulnerability and the institutional responsibilities it entails to ultimately envision an EU law of the everyday that is feminist, intersectional, inclusive and centred on human needs.

2. The Legal Construction of Invisibility

Feminist legal theorists have long challenged the claim that law is neutral or objective.Footnote 4 Carol Smart argued that law exercises a form of epistemic power,Footnote 5 determining which experiences can be understood as legal harm and which cannot. Kimberlé Crenshaw and Angela P. Harris critique the way legal feminism often centres a universalised figure of woman, warning that this homogenisation risks silencing racialised and marginalised women whose experiences do not fit dominant narratives of gendered harm.Footnote 6 In both cases, invisibility is produced by the law’s tendency to reduce complexity into recognisable forms. Invisibility functions as active erasure of lived realities through narrow categories, neutral language, ‘gender essentialism’Footnote 7 and so on. This process is particularly evident in recognition-based approaches that rely on the visibility and intelligibility of identities or harms to justify legal protection.Footnote 8 A woman may be protected from gender discrimination only if she can clearly demonstrate that her experience falls within predefined legal categories of harm. A refugee may be eligible for asylum only if their persecution fits accepted narratives – often tied to political or religious identity, rather than gendered insecurity or economic survival.Footnote 9 As Judith Butler has argued, legal frameworks tend to protect only those lives that are already deemed ‘recognisable’ within dominant political and legal imaginaries.Footnote 10 The limits of recognition thus lie in its conditional logic. To receive protection, one must first be seen. To be seen, one must conform to what the law recognises. What the law recognises is often shaped by structures of power. This logic not only excludes those who do not fit legal categories; it also pressures individuals to frame their experiences in ways that fit them and may erase key aspects of their reality.Footnote 11

Understanding how law constructs invisibility and shedding light on those affected require moving beyond formal legal texts and examining the everyday spaces where legal exclusions are lived: refugee camps, agricultural labour sites, informal housing, border zones. These spaces are not outside the law; rather, they are deeply shaped by it. Yet the people who inhabit them often remain legally unrecognised, or are only partially visible to institutions, as subjects of control rather than protection.

3. Everyday Borders, Disposable Labour and Gendered Risks in the EU

3.1. Restricted Mobility and the European Asylum System

European law constructs borders through legal architectures that govern who may move, who must stay and under what conditions lives are made liveable. These everyday borders are felt most in the daily experiences of those whose legal status renders them vulnerable. The restricted mobility is a result of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), under the Dublin Regime that ultimately forces migrants into informal economies and precarious living conditions rather than enabling them to move towards safer, more sustainable futures. Nazneen being stuck in Greece is more than a logistical inconvenience: it exposes her to harm, forces dependency on informal networks and affects her access to safety. A key element of the Dublin Regulation,Footnote 12 a cornerstone of the CEAS, is the First Entry Rule that assigns the responsibility for processing protection claims to the country where an asylum seeker first enters the EU.Footnote 13 The need for a clear responsibility-allocation mechanism under the Dublin System leads not only to disadvantages of Member States at the EU’s external bordersFootnote 14 but also, most notably, to the disadvantage of asylum seekers that are detained in the first country they enter. The flaws of the Dublin Regulation have been discussed extensively by legal scholars,Footnote 15 but it is not only impractical or a matter of solidarity between Member States. Foremost, it is questionable in terms of human rights.Footnote 16 Despite the EU Member States’ commitment to the European Convention of Human Rights, the CEAS structurally produces conditions that amount to de facto human rights violations,Footnote 17 such as pushbacks at external borders,Footnote 18 unsafe housing/degrading living conditions,Footnote 19 collective and violent expulsionFootnote 20 and illegal detention.Footnote 21 The current system leads to precarious situations at the EU’s external borders, engenders dangerous alternative routes and does not acknowledge the needs of asylum seekers. For this reason, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) considers it ‘wholly inappropriate to derive any responsibility for considering an asylum application from the fact that the applicant has been merely present in the territory of a Member State. Mere presence in a territory is often the result of fortuitous circumstances and does not imply the existence of any meaningful link or connection’.Footnote 22

3.2. Labour and Exploitation in the Agricultural Sector

Nazneen’s story in Ben Judah’s book reveals another frontier of legal invisibility: the realm of labour. Although EU law has developed to protect mobile workers within the Union, it has not done enough to ensure that unfree labour on which entire sectors, e.g. agriculture, depend is rendered legally visible.Footnote 23 According to estimates from 2021, between 650,000 and 850,000 people were employed as seasonal workers in the agri-food sector.Footnote 24 This workforce has become indispensable as the EU agricultural sector experienced a loss of over 1.3 million native workers between 2011 and 2017. These were subsequently replaced by migrant workers. In this regard, Letizia Palumbo, Alessandra Corrado and Anna Triandafyllidou observe that ‘the employment of migrant workers, often in precarious and exploitative conditions, has become a structural element of the agri-food system in many countries’.Footnote 25 This development reflects what they describe as a ‘rural exodus and demographic decline’, counterbalanced by an influx of migrants to fill the demand for flexible, low-cost labour.Footnote 26 Several studies demonstrate the interplay between migration regimes, labour policies and the restructuring of agricultural production.Footnote 27 Palumbo et al summarise: ‘Stringent migration legislation and policies, together with labour mobility policies and the labour market liberalization process, produce and influence the legal and social situation of vulnerability of migrants, rendering them the temporary, just-in-time and low-cost force required by market functions’.Footnote 28 Data from 2018 confirm this systemic precarity: 32 per cent of all employees in the agricultural sector have no written contract of employment, compared with just 5 per cent across the EU workforce.Footnote 29 However, the EU’s legal framework actively facilitates such exploitation. Seasonal employment is governed primarily by the laws of the Member States. While EU citizens enjoy equal rights with nationals through the principle of non-discrimination, non-citizens can be excluded from minimum labour protection.Footnote 30 But even EU citizenship itself does not prevent exploitation: seasonal workers from economically disadvantaged Member States are frequently paid extremely low wages and denied social benefits.Footnote 31 This shows that vulnerability is legally produced and distributed across different groups of workers.

3.3. The Role of Gender

Nazneen’s story is marked by a gender-specific dynamic. From the very beginning, her life is shaped by gendered constraints: as an Afghan woman growing up in Iran, she is subjected to a system of state-imposed ‘gender apartheid’ that restricts her rights and mobility.Footnote 32 At home, she faces domestic violence, forcing her to flee in search of safety. Yet when she reaches Greece, her gender-based risks continue to determine her life. She avoids the refugee camp because it is unsafe for women; it is a space marked by sexual violence and institutional neglect.Footnote 33 She therefore accepts work at the olive factory only to encounter exploitation under the guise of protection. Her placement on a ‘women-only production line’ suggests a gendered division of labour that acknowledges risk, but offers no rights or protections. Gender thus shapes both her vulnerability and her choices: the camp is unsafe because she is a woman; the factory can exploit her because she is a woman; and the law remains blind to both.

Migration law and labour law are deeply interconnected fields of gendered regulation.Footnote 34 Reports by the OECD and the United Nations have documented that migrant women face intersecting forms of discrimination, rooted in systemic racism, sexism and structural inequality. These include racial abuse, gender-based violence, unequal labour conditions, limited access to health services and criminalisation.Footnote 35 A study for the European Parliament stresses that reception and integration policies cannot be gender-neutral, because women face gender-specific vulnerabilities in both asylum and labour context.Footnote 36 Similarly, the Committee on the Elimination and Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) insists that female migration must be analysed in terms of gender inequality, gender labour markets and the feminisation of poverty and exploitation.Footnote 37

Despite legal commitmentsFootnote 38 to gender mainstreaming in EU policy, asylum law remains largely gender-blind in its implementation, particularly regarding mobility rights and secondary movements. As Elaine Weiner and Heather MacRae argue, gender mainstreaming was initially envisioned as a transformative project, embedding a gender perspective ‘in all policies, at all levels and at all stages’Footnote 39 to reshape the status quo.Footnote 40 However, its transformative potential has failed to materialise, particularly in core policy areas of the EU.Footnote 41 Violence and harassment are well-documented experiences of women in migration contexts.Footnote 42 Yet these forms of gendered violence often remain invisible. Legal frameworks continue to treat migrants as gender-neutral subjects, despite women making up 52 per cent of migrants arriving in Europe,Footnote 43 despite distinct risks faced by women in transit and settlement and despite overwhelming evidence, with reports estimating that up to 90 per cent of women along the Mediterranean route experience gender-based violence.Footnote 44 A historical analysis reveals that the right to asylum has been shaped by a male-centric paradigm, particularly in the post-World War II era and during the Cold War period.Footnote 45 It is therefore not neutral,Footnote 46 and without deeper reflection it will remain incapable of addressing gender-specific needs and vulnerabilities.Footnote 47

There are, however, normative and legal foundations for reimagining a more gender-responsive approach. The Istanbul Convention requires states to recognise gender-based violence as grounds for asylum under the Geneva Convention.Footnote 48 The judgment on Afghan women by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in October 2024Footnote 49 marks an important step, acknowledging gender-specific persecution. Moreover, proposals to restructure the EU asylum system exist, including the replacement of the Dublin System with a model based on the best interest of the individual, which shows that more ethical and efficient approaches are possible.Footnote 50

Gender is not merely a secondary feature of migration and labour regimes, but a key factor influencing vulnerability and exclusion. The persistence of gender-blindness in law is a structural failure and becomes a form of violence.

3.4. What This Says About Europe

The logic of invisibility that shapes Nazneen’s everyday extends beyond her individual case and reflects deeper tensions within the European legal order. In the free market, goods move freely across borders, protected and regulated by EU law. Law enables the movement of capital and commodities, while restricting and criminalising human mobility. In this way, European law silently endorses the economic structures that rely on undocumented, underpaid and unprotected labour. The question arises: Does Europe benefit from Nazneen’s exploitation? Or, more provocatively, is its economy designed by law to function because people like her are available, but invisible? As the UN report Gender on the Move observes, ‘The resultant enormous increase in irregular migration has been beneficial for multiple sectors of the economy of destination countries, which have come to rely on the availability of cheap and “flexible” labor, easily exploitable and deprived of legal protection’.Footnote 51

Women such as Nazneen occupy the bottom rung of a legal and economic hierarchy that governs migration and labour: at the top are highly skilled professionals, legally recruited and welcome, while at the very base are undocumented migrants, which is the largest and most vulnerable group.Footnote 52 Women in particular are over-represented in precarious sectors and more exposed to abuse.Footnote 53 The wildfire scene in Ben Judah’s chapter ‘Evia’ makes this hierarchy tangible. When the factory owner instructs Nazneen to save the boxes first,Footnote 54 the message is that her life is less valuable than the product of her labour. A rights-based approach might treat this as an issue of labour inspection or non-compliance, but a vulnerability-based approach questions why such arrangements are legally possible in the first place, why safety and dignity are conditioned on legal status and why European economies are permitted to thrive on invisibilised labour.

Moreover, gender is a factor in vulnerability across all the areas examined. This indicates that a fundamental reorientation of European law, wherein gender equality is recognised as a fundamental structural concern, is necessary. Yet such a shift is difficult to achieve within a legal and political system that has its foundations in economic integration. The EU was established to build a common market, and its legal frameworks continue to prioritise market efficiency, competitiveness and mobility of capital.Footnote 55 Human rights and gender equality have often been folded into market logic rather than pursued as independent goals – which is the reason why ‘efficient gender equality measures fall under the EU’s primary goal: the focus remains on economic growth and competitiveness, which has trumped gender equality measures’, as Weiner and MacRae observe.Footnote 56 Taking gendered vulnerability seriously therefore requires moving beyond a market-centric rationality and placing lived realities at the centre of legal thought.

4. Overcoming Legal Invisibility: From Recognition to Responsibility

In traditional legal, political and sociological thinking, the intuitive way to address legal invisibility would be through expanding recognition. If certain identities or harms are invisible in law, we must make them visible by including them in the framework of rights and protections. Recognition, in this sense, appears to be the natural remedy to invisibility and the logical route to equality. However, recognition alone does not dismantle injustice. The belief in law’s neutrality and claim to universality can itself become part of the problem. Edward A. Purcell Jr demonstrates this in the context of so-called ‘colourblind’ laws in the United States, where neutrality masks structural inequality and allows the law to reproduce injustice while appearing impartial.Footnote 57 More fundamentally, recognition-based approaches carry an internal risk. Multicultural and identity-based legal frameworks often presuppose already constituted subjects, which means that those who live outside of normative categories remain unrecognised and unprotected. Legal visibility is conditioned upon fitting into existing social and political norms. Butler warns that when those norms are unable to absorb certain lives, they become not just exclusive but violent.Footnote 58 Charles Taylor emphasises this in his work on recognition and multiculturalism. According to him, ‘our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others … Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression’.Footnote 59 Taylor warns against essentialism. Recognition must not be based on rigid group identities; it must be open to internal diversity and complexity, otherwise it simply replaces invisibility with a new form of categorisation.Footnote 60

What could a different approach look like? Butler suggests a more sensitive form of recognition, one rooted in shared precariousness instead of identity. All lives are precarious, while some are more exposed due to political or social structures.Footnote 61 While Butler does not abandon recognition, her shift towards precariousness opens a path toward a broader, more universal basis for legal responsibility. Fineman’s vulnerability theory proposes a more radical reorientation – a post-identity legal framework.Footnote 62 According to her, the promise of equality must not be conditioned upon any belonging to any identity category, nor should it be confined to only certain spaces and institutions.Footnote 63 Fineman argues that the liberal legal subject, the autonomous, self-sufficient individual, should be replaced with the vulnerable subject, since all human beings are vulnerable. It should be seen as a universal and constant condition of embodied life, a structural reality from which law must begin. Her approach rejects recognition as a basis for equality. In her view, equality must be based not on what group one belongs to, but on the state’s responsibility to build institutions that foster resilience and respond to shared human needs. This also means rethinking institutions themselves. According to Fineman, the state must become actively responsive not by enforcing formal equality, but by designing systems that anticipate and respond to human interdependence.Footnote 64

Nazneen’s story illustrates this need. Her exclusion is a matter of non-recognition and the result of institutional abandonment. A vulnerability approach would shift the question from who is she and does she fit into a legal category to what does she need and how do our legal and institutional structures respond to that? Recognition might be a necessary first step to counter invisibility. However, what is further required is a shift from recognition to responsibility, from seeing to acting, from identifying subjects to redesigning systems to fulfil every human being’s needs.

5. Towards a Feminist Law of the Everyday

5.1. Seeing the Invisible

A feminist law of the everyday begins with the lived realities of those made invisible by law and draws from feminist epistemologies that challenge whose knowledge counts, and who gets to define harm, justice or relevance. It is aware that law is shaped by structures of power, that it organises visibility and invisibility. This approach refuses the traditional separation between citizen/non-citizen, public/private, formal/informal, law/life. It insists that refugee camps, domestic work, gender-based risks, informal housing and survival labour are all legal spaces. A feminist law of the everyday approach raises the question: What is being experienced that the law does not see and how can law be made accountable to that reality?

5.2. Rethinking the Legal Subject

Central to this reorientation is a critique of the liberal legal subject. Instead of regarding the subject as autonomous, a feminist law of the everyday focuses on the embedded subject, which is situated within social, economic and political structures,Footnote 65 and is defined by vulnerability and relationality.Footnote 66 The case of Nazneen illustrates this: her reality cannot be attributed to ‘bad choices’ or her failing, as an autonomous subject, to comply with rules. She is embedded in a system that denies her legal status, disregards her gender-specific risks and exploits her labour while withholding essential protection. The precarity experienced by the subject is systemic in nature and not a personal concern.

5.3. Centring Responsibility

Is it only as an I, that is, as an individual, that I am responsible? Could it be that … who I am is bound with others in necessary ways? Am I even thinkable without that world of others?Footnote 67

A feminist law of the everyday extends to the concept of relational responsibility.Footnote 68 This acknowledges that responsibility is shaped by social structures, institutional norms and relationships – as well as, consequently, by networks of dependence, benefit and proximity.Footnote 69 Furthermore, responsibility must be exercised on a global scale, in a manner that is non-imperialist and characterised by solidarity.Footnote 70 Applied to asylum law, this would mean allocating responsibility not according to geography and first entry, but to solidarity and connection, considering individuals’ needs and vulnerabilities as well as the differentiated institutional capacities of Member States. It would consider the correlation between actions of European citizens, governments and institutions, and the underlying reasons why individuals seek refuge.Footnote 71 Moreover, this reorientation renders the economic structures that depend on unfree labour visible, thereby imposing obligations not only on states, but also on employers and market actors.

5.4. Shifting to a Feminist Legal Imagination

In essence, a feminist law of the everyday entails a paradigm shift. It challenges us to reimagine law itself, from passive recognition to active responsibility, from formal equality to structural accountability. It calls upon legal scholars, judges, legislators and practitioners to adopt a different approach: to give voice to marginalised perspectives, to acknowledge the law’s complicity in erasure and to allow the realities of the most vulnerable to redefine what justice means in Europe.

6. Conclusion

In ‘Evia’, Ben Judah illuminates the intersection of migration, labour, gender and socio-economic challenges. This ultimately suggests that a box of olives may be more valuable than the life of undocumented migrants. Their labour is indispensable, yet they remain outside the legal system. The European economy benefits from these structures, relying on a pool of ‘flexible’ workers who are necessary but denied protection. This contradiction reveals that the law does not fail to recognise these realities; rather, it relies on their invisibility. A feminist law of the everyday calls for making these realities visible and reimagining a Europe that takes responsibility for the vulnerabilities on which it depends.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Leonie De Weerth and Hanna Welte for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Loïc Azoulai and Jack Meakin for organising the seminar that led to the development of this project, as well as for their ongoing support. ChatGPT (OpenAI; accessed April–November 2025; available at <https://chat.openai.com>) was used to assist with language editing, structuring of arguments and refinement of formulations. All outputs were critically reviewed and revised. All arguments and conclusions are my own.

Competing interests

The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.

References

1 B Judah, This is Europe: The Way We Live Now (Picador 2023) 487.

2 ‘Sometimes the very unrecognizability of the other brings about a crisis in the norms that govern recognition. If and when, in an effort to confer or to receive a recognition that fails again and again, I call into question the normative horizon within which recognition takes place, this questioning is part of the desire for recognition, a desire that can find no satisfaction, and whose unsatisfiability establishes a critical point of departure for the interrogation of available norms’. J Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press 2008) 24.

3 M Albertson Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition’ 20(1) (2008) Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 1.

4 N Lacey, ‘Feminist Legal Theory and the Rights of Women’ in K Knop (ed), Gender and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2006). The law’s claim to be objective and neutral may ultimately be authoritarian: see P Goodrich, ‘Historical Aspects of Legal Interpretation’ 61(3) (1986) Indiana Law Journal 331, 333 (‘the legal concept of interpretation is theological in its derivation and that it is unjustifiably authoritarian in its practice’); K Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ (1989) University of Chicago Legal Forum; AP Harris, ‘Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory’ 42(3) (1990) SLR 581, 583.

5 C Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989) – the idea of epistemic power is present throughout the book.

6 Crenshaw (n 4); Harris (n 4) 585.

7 Harris (n 4) 585.

8 For example, regarding the invisibility of harm against gendered and racialised subjects, see LKL Tjon Soei Len and A de Ruijter, ‘Conceptualising the Tortuous Harms of Sexist and Racist Hate Speech’ (2023) European Law Open 8.

9 JR Castel, ‘Rape, Sexual Assault and the Meaning of Persecution’ 4(1) (1992) International Journal of Refugee Law 39, 40; S Kim, ‘Gender-related Persecution: A Legal Analysis of Gender Bias in Asylum Law’ 2 (1994) American University Journal of Gender and the Law 107, 119; see A Tizzano, ‘Why Doesn’t She Seek International Protection in the European Union?’ 54(2) (2022) New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 559, 602–3.

10 J Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Verso 2009) 31–2.

11 C Taylor, Multiculturalism and ‘the Politics of Recognition’: An Essay (Princeton University Press 1992) 43. For example, in feminist and queer asylum cases, the way courts assess persecution can lead to the reproduction of cultural stereotypes and the process of othering, which can influence applicants: see T Spijkerboer, ‘Gender, Sexuality, Asylum and European Human Rights’ 29(2) (2018) Law and Critique 221, 222–3; N Nosrati and D Tomaselli, ‘Whose Values?’ (Verfassungsblog 2025), available at <https://verfassungsblog.de/ecj-western-values-gender> accessed 31 July 2026.

12 Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 establishing the criteria and mechanisms for determining the Member State responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the Member States by a third-country national or a stateless person (recast) 29 June 2013.

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16 Binetti Armstrong (n 15), 365; D Zaviršek, ‘The Humanitarian Crisis of Migration versus the Crisis of Humanitarianism: Current Dimensions and Challenges for Social Work Practice’ 36(3) (2017) Social Work Education 231; Bugge (n 15) 96–7.

17 Amnesty International, The Human Cost of Fortress Europe (2014), available at <https://www.amnesty.ie/fortress-europe-human-cost-fortress-europe> accessed 31 July 2026.

18 ECtHR Case of A.R.E. v Greece ECLI:CE:ECHR:2025:0107JUD001578321 – suspecting systemic pushback practices by Greek authorities at the Greek–Turkish border.

19 ECtHR Case of M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece ECLI:CE:ECHR:2011:0121JUD003069609 – holding that returning an asylum seeker to Greece under Dublin violated Art 3 ECHR due to degrading conditions; Case of A.D. v. Greece ECLI:CE:ECHR:2023:0404JUD005536319. In this context, the European Court of Human Rights explicitly recognised the extreme vulnerability and structural deprivation experienced by Afghan asylum seekers within the Dublin system in M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece. The CJEU also acknowledged ‘systemic flaws’ in the Greek asylum procedure and reception conditions in Joined cases C-411/10 and C-493/10 N.S. v the Secretary of State for the Home Department ECLI:EU:C:2011:865, relying on M.S.S. Despite this clear judicial recognition of structural injustice, the response resulted in only a minimal adjustment to the Dublin regime, rather than a structural reconfiguration.

20 ECtHR Case of Hirsi Jamaa and others v Italy ECLI:CE:ECHR:2012:0223JUD002776509; Case of R.N. v Hungary ECLI:CE:ECHR:2023:0504JUD000007118; Case of J.A. and others v Italy ECLI:CE:ECHR:2023:0330JUD002132918.

21 ECtHR Case of J.A. and others v Italy (n 20); Case of M.M. v Hungary ECLI:CE:ECHR:2023:0504JUD002681915; Case of A.C. and M.C. v France ECLI:CE:ECHR:2023:0504JUD000428921.

22 UNHCR, ‘Revisiting the Dublin Convention: Some Reflections by UNHCR in Response to the Commission Staff Working Paper’ (2001), available at <https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/legacy-pdf/43662b3e2.pdf> accessed 31 July 2026.

23 L Palumbo, A Corrado and A Triandafyllidou, ‘Migrant Labour in the Agri-Food System in Europe: Unpacking the Social and Legal Factors of Exploitation’ 24(2) (2022) European Journal of Migration and Law 179, 185; G Toksöz, ‘Informal Labour Markets and the Need for Migrant Workers: The Case of Turkey from a Comparative Perspective’ in Erik Berggren et al (eds), Irregular Migration, Informal Labour and Community: A Challenge for Europe (Shaker 2007) 184ff.

24 M Samek Lodovici et al, Revaluation of Working Conditions and Wages for Essential Workers (EMPL 2022) 48 <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/695491/IPOL_STU(2021)695491_EN.pdf> accessed 31 July 2026.

25 Palumbo et al (n 23) 181.

26 Ibid. 183.

27 Ibid. 182; A Corrado, C de Castro and D Perrotta (eds), Migration and Agriculture: Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean area (Routledge 2016); JF Rye and K O’Reilly (eds), International Labour Migration to Europe’s Rural Regions (Routledge 2020).

28 Palumbo et al (n 23) 183.

29 CC Williams and A Horodnic, ‘Tackling Undeclared Work in the Agricultural Sector’ (2018), available at <https://www.ela.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2021-09/%27Tacklingundeclaredworkintheagriculturalsector%27report.pdf> accessed 31 July 2026.

30 Directive 2004/38/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States, Directive 2004/38/EC (European Parliament).

31 C Bruzelius and M Seeleib-Kaiser, ‘Enforcement of Minimum Labor Standards and Institutionalized Exploitation of Seasonal Agricultural Workers in the EU’ in S Börner and M Seeleib-Kaiser (eds), European Social Policy and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges to National Welfare and EU Policy (Oxford University Press 2023) 167–8.

32 M Sato, ‘Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran’ (12 May 2025) 2–3, available at <https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5862-situation-human-rights-islamic-republic-iran-report-special> accessed 31 July 2026; United Nations Human Rights Council, ‘Iran’s Proposed Hijab Law Could Amount to “Gender Apartheid”’: UN Experts’ (Media Release, 1 September 2023), available at <https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/09/irans-proposed-hijab-law-could-amount-gender-apartheid-un-experts> accessed 31 July 2026.

33 Judah (n 1) 490.

34 S Fredman, Human Rights Transformed: Positive Rights and Positive Duties (Oxford University Press 2008).

35 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), ‘Guide on Gender-Sensitive Labour Migration Policies’ (2009), available at <https://cdn.osce.org/sites/default/files/f/documents/b/4/37228.pdf> accessed 31 July 2026; UN Women, ‘Racially Marginalized Migrant Women: Human Rights Abuses at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Migration’ (2022) <https://knowledge.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2022/11/racially-marginalized-migrant-women> accessed 31 July 2026; UN Women, ‘Gender on the Move: Working on the Migration–Development Nexus from a Gender Perspective’ (2013), available at <https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2013/12/gender-on-the-move> accessed 31 July 2026.

36 S Sansonetti, ‘Female Refugees and Asylum Seekers: The Issue of Integration’ (2016), available at <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/556929/IPOL_STU(2016)556929_EN.pdf> accessed 31 July 2026.

37 CEDAW, ‘General recommendation No. 26 on women migrant workers’ (2008) 5.

38 Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (CETS No. 210) 1 August 2014 (the Istanbul Convention).

39 Council of Europe, ‘Gender Mainstreaming: Conceptual Framework, Methodology and Presentation of Good Practices’ (1998) 15, available at <https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=0900001680596135> accessed 31 July 2026.

40 Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, ‘Manual for Gender Mainstreaming: Employment, Social Inclusion and Social Protection Policies’ (Office for Official Publications of the European Communities 2008) 11, available at <https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/c021a87f-4ac9-4832-8e88-d0caa1c9e389/language-en> accessed 31 July 2026.

41 E Weiner and H MacRae, ‘The Persistent Invisibility of Gender in EU Policy: Introduction’ 18 (2014) European Integration Online Papers 4, 11.

42 UN Human Rights Council Working Group, Visit to Greece: Report of the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls, A/HRC/44/51/Add.1 (2020) 15, available at <https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc4451add1-visit-greece-report-working-group-discrimination-against> accessed 31 July 2026; UN Women, ‘Racially Marginalized Migrant Women’ (n 35); UN Women, Migration Experiences of People with Diverse SOGIESC (2023), available at <https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2023/12/policy-paper-migration-experiences-of-people-with-diverse-sogiesc> accessed 31 July 2026; UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, ‘The Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2024’ (2024), available at <https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2024/09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2024> accessed 31 July 2026.

43 UN, International Migrant Stock 2024, available at <https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/content/international-migrant-stock> accessed 31 July 2026.

44 IOM, MMC and UNJCR, On This Journey, No One Cares if You Live or Die: Abuse, Protection and Justice Along Routes Between East and West Africa and Africa’s Mediterranean Coast – Volume 2, available at <https://publications.iom.int/books/journey-no-one-cares-if-you-live-or-die> accessed 31 July 2026; UNHCR, ‘UNHCR Warns of Devastating Spike in Risk of Gender-based Violence for Women and Girls Forced to Flee’ (2024), available at <https://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing-notes/unhcr-warns-devastating-spike-risk-gender-based-violence-women-and-girls-forced> accessed 31 July 2026.

45 HL Johnson, ‘Click to Donate: Visual Images, Constructing Victims and Imagining the Female Refugee’ 32(6) (2011) Third World Quarterly 1015, 1020; A Betts, G Loescher and J Milner, UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection (Routledge 2012) 11, 20; Tizzano (n 9) 569.

46 Kim (n 8) 112; U Krause, ‘Flucht und Frauen: Reflexionen des Forschungsstandes’ in S Farrokhzad, K Scherschel and M Schmitt (eds), Geflüchtete Frauen: Analysen - Lebenssituationen - Angebotsstrukturen (Springer 2022) 25.

47 Sansonetti (n 36) 10; see also Tizzano (n 9) 604.

48 Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (CETS No. 210) 1 August 2014 (the Istanbul Convention) Art 60.

49 Joined cases C‑608/22 and C-609/22, AH and FN ECLI:EU:C:2024:828.

50 Binetti Armstrong (n 15) 379; B Garcés-Mascareñas (n 15); PRO ASYL et. al. ‘For a Free Choice of Host Country in the EU: Respecting Refugees’ Interests’ (Memorandum 2015), available at <https://www.proasyl.de/en/material/memorandum-for-a-free-choice-of-host-country-in-the-eu> accessed 31 July 2026.

51 UN Women, ‘Gender on the Move’ (n 35).

52 Bruzelius and Seeleib-Kaiser (n 31) 167.

53 UN Women, ‘Gender on the Move’ (n 35) 179.

54 Judah (n 1) 500.

55 See, for instance, the concept of internal market rationality: M Bartl, ‘Internal Market Rationality, Private Law and the Direction of the Union: Resuscitating the Market as the Object of the Political’ 21(5) (2015) European Law Journal 572.

56 Weiner and MacRae (n 41) 4.

57 EA Purcell Jr, ‘Race and the Law: The Visibile and the Invisibile’ 66(2) (2021) New York Law School Review 141.

58 Butler, Frames of War (n 10) 6–7.

59 Taylor (n 11) 25–6.

60 Ibid 43.

61 Butler, Frames of War (n 10) 25–32.

62 Albertson Fineman (n 3).

63 Ibid 23.

64 Ibid 13.

65 This means recognising that the extent to which the subject depends on institutions (healthcare, housing, asylum, work permits, etc.) is affected by social norms (e.g. gender roles, migration policies) and constrained by material and legal structures (e.g. status, documents, borders).

66 Relationality opposes concepts of persons as autonomous, self-centred individuals: CM Koggel, A Harbin and JJ Llewellyn, ‘Feminist Relational Theory’ 18(1) (2022) Journal of Global Ethics 1.

67 Butler, Frames of War (n 10) 35.

68 S Ong and J Savulescu, ‘Relational Responsibility: Bringing the Wider Social Environment into the Analysis’ 18 (2025) Asian Bioethics Review 321.

69 Ibid 2.

70 Butler, Frames of War (n 10) 37.

71 J Heier, ‘Relationale Verantwortung: Vergangenheitszugewandte und zukunftsbezogene Sorge’ in E Conradi and F Vosman (eds), Praxis der Achtsamkeit: Schlüsselbegriffe der Care-Ethik (Campus Verlag 2016) 384.