Using the lens of immigration and asylum, this Article develops a new understanding of legal personhood on the basis of equal human dignity, as the interface between legal personhood, equality and human rights, in order to address the dual-faceted and opposing reality of immigrants and asylum claimants in relation to their equality as humans in the order of nature and their inequality within the social/political order of Europe, where they are subjected to a constant process of depersonification and reification. This reformulated approach to legal personhood not only seeks to remove the debasement and dehumanisation that has come to characterise European Union (EU) immigration and asylum law but also intends to address the limitations of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) as a valid platform for translating the EU’s own self-proclaimed commitment to human rights into justiciable normative claims.
