Better off Without Parents? Refugee Children and Family Reunification: Norms and Ethical Concerns

This chapter aims to correlate and analyse the regulations in place to ensure the rights of refugee children and their right to family reunification. Specific laws in force (albeit considered generally and a priori) that are purported to guarantee fundamental rights to refugee minors, in practice, lead to injustices. The existing laws serve the rights of unaccompanied refugee minors, while the rights of the accompanied ones remain comparatively unguarded. Moreover, due to the use (or abuse) of DNA testing, regulations in place to grant family reunification lead to the favourable treatment of children biologically related to their parents vs minors who are not. Additionally, if the two contexts are evaluated together, the considered regulations inadvertently create lose-lose situations for refugee minors without a biological family connection, raising additional ethical concerns. These resulting injustices seem even to head us towards the ethically challenging, provocative consequence that refugee minors may be better off without parents. The chapter then argues for the ethical revision of the relevant laws through a critical examination of the underlying assumptions, challenging, in particular, the existing concept of family. Doing so will contribute to safeguarding the best interests of refugee minors and guarantee them equal access to opportunities.