Shylock del Bengala. Debiti migratori, vite in ostaggio e diritto d’asilo (Un approccio corologico-interculturale alle implicazioni anti-umanitarie del patto commissorio)

The essay addresses the relationships, often tragically interwoven, extant between migration debts and asylum applications. This topic is approached in a multidisciplinary way, so as to generate a convergence of legal and anthropological skillsets. The inquiry relies upon field research carried out among Bangladeshi asylum seekers in Italy. Through an intercultural and chorological – namely, spatial-semantic – analysis, the authors explore the encounter between different cultures and experiential spaces within the spectrum of law. In the essay, they propose legal solutions to the difficulties that asylum seekers encounter when such situations fall under the umbrella of humanitarian protection. This result is achieved by means of an inter-spatial re-interpretation of theban on pactum commissorium (art. 2744, Italian Civil Code) or security transfers and their implications for the respect for human rights. More generally, an intercultural use of rights and law--even state law-- could pave the way for a values-based legal pluralism capable of including cultural difference from the local to the global level. Moreover, alongside a chorological approach, it could enable social subjects to overcome limits inherent in strictly normative pluralism or inter-legality and, in this way, to exercise their cultural creativity precisely by virtue of the potentialities of legal discourse.