Human Dignity on Trial: Welfare Judges, Immigration Politics and Social Change

ABSTRACT Building on ethnographic fieldwork in welfare hearings in French‐speaking Belgium, this article explores how judges decide between irregular migrants claiming social assistance and the public welfare administrations refusing such claims. Investigating these cases helps to analyze how members of the bench establish truthfulness and ponder the social and political consequences of their decisions. In these contexts, irregular migrants, despite being the more disadvantaged party to the case, regularly win against the state. At the theoretical level, this article provides a counterpoint to two general trends in sociolegal and migration studies. First, it nuances the idea that judicial proceedings generally tend to further or reproduce inequalities by showing how courts can, under certain conditions, help uphold migrants' rights against the state. Second, it highlights the importance of law and formal institutions in the governance of precarious migrants.