HUMAN RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION FOR VULNERABLE ASYLUM APPLICANTS

The Portuguese asylum application process for the unaccompanied minors 5 medical exams. Texeira refers to specific cases 16 that reached the European Court of Human Rights (ETCHR) as the false age determination from poor and non-scholastic age assessment methods led to unaccompaniedminors be denied reunificationwith their families or encounter delays in the process because their cases were considered dubious. Texeira concludes that the lack of a common age assessment strategy and method is the result of the implications and the false conclusions for the UAM that re- sult in the prolongment of the separation from their families or the deprivation of fos- ter care and guarantees for minors. Another research by Santinho 17 demonstrates how the UAM experience the asylum process in Portugal based on some interviews she conducted directly with them. One of the testimonies concerned a minor whose Asylum Claim Declaration document has been renovated every two months for three years instead of his case being pro- cessed. Santinho states that the minor after having been waiting all this time, he de- cided to board a truck and pass the boarders, hoping to make it to Germany where, according to him, lived part of his family. The frustration of the long waiting in Portu- gal for the asylum procedure seems to concern the majority of young unaccompa- nied asylum seekers based on Santinho. Santinho quotes the words of another inter- viewedminor“ First they accept us, then they reject us. They onlymake life difficult for us. They don’t even understand what it means to be a refugee... ”. Further, Santinho states that another issue encountered during her research is the presentation of false iden- tification documents and narratives from the applicants’ side. She stresses that the real reasons for the departure and the arrival in a reception country are not always linear, leading the applicant to have to adapt or change his/her narrative according to the circumstances of the country where he/she was received. The same research discusses the issue of the detention of UAM in the airport, the experience of which is represented through the lenses of an interviewed female minor that quotes “Por- tugal is just a waiting room in a huge airport”. Last but not least, Santinho’s research highlights how important is to the UAM to re-establish the sense of a family during their integration in Portugal as the majority of the interviews young asylum seekers mentioned that as they share the same dialect or origin, they already consider them- selves as brothers and support each other psychologically throughout the challeng- ing procedure of asylum. 16. Mugenzi v. France, Application No. 52701/09 Tanda-Muzinga v. France. Senigo Longue and Others v. France. 17. Santinho, M. C. (2016). Refugiados e requerentes de asilo emPortugal: contornos políticos no cam- po da saúde (Vol. 48). Observatório das Migrações , ACM, IP.