That “residual load” in the sea: when the concept of the vulnerable is used to discriminate and not to protect

In recent weeks we have observed the new course of migration policies in the Mediterranean of the Meloni government and its Minister of the Interior, Piantedosi. Unlike Salvini’s practice in the Conte I government (which consisted of keeping ships offshore to prevent them from approaching the coast), in the last month the new government has allowed NGO ships that had rescued migrants in the South to enter Italian territorial waters of the Mediterranean, but then granted only a “selective landing”. From the ships docked in Sicilian ports, only migrants could disembark who special doctors who boarded the docked ships judged “fragile” or “vulnerable”.

Although the decision on the human vulnerability of migrants has been considered a technical-medical assessment, the very concept of fragility and vulnerability opens up to a large spectrum of reflections and speculations that are interesting to analyse.

In recent decades the concept of vulnerable person he has been at the center of many studies and critical reflections in the field of bioethics and political philosophy, especially in the world of gender studies. I have been fortunate enough to address this issue from a privacy perspective in the last few years of my legal research. The problem with the concept of “vulnerability” is that it lends itself to being highly stigmatizing: it seems to place the accent on the intrinsic characteristics of the fragile subject, rather than on the structural, social, hierarchical, institutional, economic characteristics which marginalize that subject to the point of making it more at risk of “vulnera” (damage). Furthermore, there is a strong risk of considering vulnerability as a static and monolithic attribute of “certain subjects”, but this is not the case: marginalization and the imbalance of power make us at a higher risk of damage in many contexts and for many overlapping variables. Thus vulnerability must be observed in its “layered”, contextual dynamism, with an intersectional eye: we are all vulnerable as humans, but some are more vulnerable than others in a given context, due to one or more personal or social conditions , transient or permanent, superimposed in different degrees of intensity, etc. This was the approach that inspired the formation of the new International Observatory on Vulnerability in the World of Data Protection (“VULNERA”), which opened in Brussels last week.

The point of arrival of many researchers on the subject is that the concept of human vulnerability must be used to strengthen and protect and never to stigmatize, divide, discriminate. And it is precisely this that makes us understand that an abuse of the concept of “vulnerable people” has taken place on those ships docked in Sicilian ports.

First of all, vulnerability is not and cannot be assessed only by a doctor: migrants are vulnerable from a psychological, social, economic, linguistic, political, sexual point of view, and so on. The fact that medical frailty is the most “objective” and easiest to ascertain is a convenient excuse.

Secondly, using the concept of “vulnerable” (in a restrictive and monolithic key) only to discriminate between salvageable and unsalvageable, between humans to be welcomed and “residual” humans, to be “discarded”, is exactly the manifestation of all the risks that many scholars in the last thirty years have underlined. The human being is made fragile by his multifaceted context. Using the vulnerability of some subjects as a flag to exclude others only leads to a useless and short-sighted war between the last and the very last.