This contribution offers a study of the French national asylum Court’s jurisprudence regarding Sudanese petitions to refugee status. Case law analysis shows that the French court refers to a grid of identity and minority assignation that promotes the Sudanese state’s national identity discourse, despite the lack of any legal basis whatsoever in Sudanese law. When assigning identity categories to Sudanese petitioners, the asylum court translates foreign techniques of identity assignations that were crafted in their context of origin mainly as a means to perpetuate and normalize intentional representations of discrimination and persecution, and whose original purpose was notably to disguise other types of practices of discrimination elusive to the Sudanese law.