Från barn till flyktingbarn - en diskursanalys av dokument som används vid arbete med barns asylutredningar

Abstract

The Swedish Migration Agency assesses and decide on children's asylum cases in Sweden. The Swedish Aliens Act, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and, since 2016, the Temporary Act, are the main laws applied when the agency determent a child’s asylum case. Since 1990, when Sweden ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the convention has been applied as an international law, which, for Sweden's dualistic system requires to have less significance than national laws. On the other hand, the convention was incorporated into Swedish law in January 2020, which brought some changes for children's rights that require, among other things, its asylum matters. The incorporation shall, among other things, entail a clarification for the child's rights of what is required for hearing, but does not entail new conditions for being granted a Swedish residence permit. On the other hand, the Convention on the Rights of the Child can now be invoked in courts where it has not been possible before, but the changes are so newly updated, there are no directives from the Migration Court of Appeal on how the Convention on the Rights of the Child should be applied in relation to the Swedish Aliens Act and temporary act. This leaves room for self-interpretation by the authorities which becomes problematic as they must work uniformly and can furthermore create ambiguity in the asylum-seeking children. This study therefore intends to contribute to the discussion on the common application of the three documents applied in the work on children's asylum, which does so by examining and analysing the language in documents with coding and discourse analysis as tools. Discourse analysis, which is applicable as both method and theory, will also be used in this study. Discourse analysis will need to be used to make a discussion about how the discourse on children is presented, because I intend to reflect on whether children's rights are met or not. After analysis of material, it shows that setting the discourse on whether children are presented is based on the choice of perspective and theoretical framework. The child is sometimes presented as an object rather than a subject, where rights can be considered as an option based on certified authorities´ choices on whether to add a right or withdraw it. This means that it´s a question of power between the child and the authorities, and that the law in some way can be angled, and therefore be an option rather than a right.