Paper details
| Paper authors | Nataliya Tchermalykh |
| In panel on | Making Live, Letting Die at Europe’s Borders – violence and resistance and human mobility |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
|
Abstract
This paper describes and dissects the role of temporality in the governance of asylum-seeking children, especially those traveling to Europe unaccompanied by their families. It is based on three concrete cases that the author confronted in her practice as a legal anthropologist on the French-British border, on Greek islands and in Switzerland. All of these cases shed light on the role of age, as a category that can be simultaneously considered as a resource for enhanced mobility (as constituent of vulnerability), and as an exclusionary category leading to confinement in the children-oriented facilities till their passage to majority.
In the case of non-citizen children this moment does not lead to a fuller spectrum of rights, but on the contrary reiterates the subject in his or her status of an alien, subjected to immediate deportation. In other words, as migrant children transition to adulthood, they are affected by a radical change in legal regime: they experience “the evaporation” of rights previously accorded to them as children (Hammarberg; Kanics, Senovilla Hernández, and Touzenis).
In practice, legal professionals often refer to this critical moment as “18 years and one day”. This paper is in inquiry into “temporal architectures” of migrant childhoods - which is a complex composition of laws, institutions, built environments, services and technologies (Sharma) used as tools of border control and governance. It extends existing literature on childhood and time by confronting the multiple, mundane ways in which time is enacted through legal assemblages, surrounding young migrants’ lives, producing what E. Cohen termed the devastating effects of “temporal injustice”, in which the temporal border between childhood and adulthood is not alleviated but reinforced by domestic laws and international protocols.
