Imagine a boy from Somalia who cannot prove his minority in order to be entitled to a guardian because he has no birth certificate.
Picture an Afghan couple, claiming for asylum, whose Iranian marriage certificate proves a religious marriage that was concluded in Iran when the girl was 16. Such legal issues – child in Somalia, but questioned in Belgium; married in Iran, but not in Belgium – relate to the recognition of personal status in a migration context. The Afghan couple may encounter difficulties of having their Iranian marriage recognized in the country of asylum.

Due to the current focus on the ‘management’ of migration flows, these legal issues related to the cross-border portability of personal status and their impact on fundamental human rights have been neglected for too long. The proposed research will empirically investigate these pressing legal issues. It aims at unravelling the interactions between two legal frameworks: one concerning the international protection applications and family reunification (migration law) and the other dealing with the cross-border portability of personal status (private international law). To this end, the research first aims at mapping the legal problems related to refugees' personal and family status. In a second phase, it will investigate whether and how the mapping and the awareness of these interactions can lead to a better coordination of these two legal frameworks with the aim of enhancing the protection of refugees.