No abstract

Evidence suggests that Europe’s Dublin Regulation is increasing the precarity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) asylum applicants. Dublin allocates responsibility for examining asylum claims between EU Member States. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) guides the obligations of States under Dublin. Increasingly, the ECtHR draws on the concept of vulnerability to frame the experiences of asylum seekers. Vulnerability purportedly functions for the ECtHR as a lens through which the harm experienced by asylum applicants is magnified, enabling it to better recognize human rights violations. Nevertheless, the ECtHR’s vulnerability lens may be distorted by hetero- and cisgender normativity. We explore some implications of the ECtHR’s assumptions for how the vulnerabilities of LGBTQ asylum seekers in Europe under Dublin register with the ECtHR. We suggest that the combined frameworks of intersectional invisibility and layers of vulnerability can improve the ECtHR’s capacity to understand how LGBTQ asylum applicants may be particularly vulnerable under Dublin.