Vernacularizing asylum law in Malta

Abstract

This chapter reviews, from a legal anthropological standpoint, certain key features of the legal and administrative structures through which African asylum seekers are ''received" and ''managed" in Malta. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the Refugee Status Determination process operates and how this process itself, as well as the various forms of subsidiary and/or humanitarian status which result from it, are a medium through which vernacular Maltese understandings of refugee law are constructed. Thus this review shows how official structures, procedures and statuses are implicated in producing and re-producing grass roots' social perceptions of these migrants as abusive recipients of humanitarian charity instead of being subjects of legal rights. In this context integration can only occur through the informal economy and through mechanisms of incorporation which are not based on legal categories and administrative practices, but on social relationships of friendship, patronage and hospitality.