VULNERABILITY AS A CATEGORY UNDER CONSTRUCTION IN THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS JURISPRUDENCE: LIMITS AND POTENTIALITY

Although the vulnerability discourse is increasingly frequent in jurisprudence, international conventions and recommendations, its meaning is still far from being univocal and coherent. This work analyzes the concept of vulnerability in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the last fifteen years. The goal of this work is to contribute to the academic debate on vulnerability as a category that allows human rights violations to be related with their structural causes in judicial practice, opening the door to a substantive protection of human rights. Two main limits of the concept of vulnerability that is handled by the ECtHR are addressed: on the one hand, the general lack of positive measures required to the condemned State and, on the other, the use of a naturalized and homogenizing notion of vulnerable group. Finally, through the analysis of the category of "specific vulnerability", the intersectionality approach is identified as a useful interpretative criterion to exploit the potentiality of the concept of vulnerability in the judicial praxis of the Council of Europe.