Anthropology and Expertise in the Asylum Courts

by Good; Anthony

• ISBN13: 9781904385561
• ISBN10: 1904385567
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-12-13
• Publisher: Cavendish Pub Ltd

Summary

Although asylum has generated unparalleled levels of public and political concern over the past decade, there has been astonishingly little field research on the topic. This is a study of the legal process of claiming asylum from an anthropological perspective, focusing on the role of expert evidence from 'country experts' such as anthropologists. It describes how such evidence is used in assessments of asylum claims by the Home Office and by adjudicators and tribunals hearing asylum appeals. It compares uses of social scientific and medical evidence in legal decision-making and analyses anthropologically the legal uses of key concepts from the 1951 Refugee Convention, such as 'race', 'religion', and 'social group'. Evidence is drawn from field observation of more than 300 appeal hearings in London and Glasgow; from reported case law; and from interviews with immigration adjudicators, tribunal chairs, barristers and solicitors, as well as expert witnesses.

Author Biography

Anthony Good is Professor of Social Anthropology in Practice at Edinburgh University

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Table of cases	p. xv
Table of statutes	p. xxiii
Table of statutory instruments	p. xxv
Prologue: Tales of persecution	p. 1
Asylum as a social and political problem	p. 5
The emergence of the refugee	p. 5
The scale of the 'problem'	p. 7
Background to the research	p. 10
Anthropologists and lawyers	p. 15
The fall and rise of the anthropology of law	p. 15
Legal and anthropological discourses	p. 25
Anthropology in the courts	p. 34
Studying asylum	p. 39
Previous studies of asylum processes	p. 39
Research methods	p. 42
Convention refugees: an anthropological approach	p. 47
The Refugee Convention in the European Union	p. 47
UK interpretations of the 1951 Convention	p. 50
'Well-founded fear'	p. 51
'Of being persecuted'	p. 54
'For reasons of race'	p. 63
'Religion'	p. 66
'Nationality'	p. 73
'Membership of a particular social group'	p. 74
'Political opinion'	p. 84
'Outside the country of his nationality'	p. 87
'Unable [or] unwilling'	p. 87
Gender and sexuality	p. 91
UNHCR and IND: an overview	p. 96
Claiming asylum	p. 99
Processing and assessing applications	p. 99
Appeal hearings	p. 105
The hearing process	p. 109
Certification	p. 117
Tribunal hearings	p. 119
Outcomes	p. 122
Expert evidence	p. 129
'Objective evidence'	p. 129
A brief history of expert witnesses	p. 131
The duties of expert witnesses	p. 136
Reliability and admissibility of expert evidence	p. 140
Instructing 'country experts'	p. 146
Expert reports	p. 148
Interpretation	p. 153
Interpreters in the asylum process	p. 153
Interpretation problems	p. 157
The impact of interpreters on asylum hearings	p. 166
Cultural (mis)translation	p. 170
Translation and performance	p. 182
Assessing credibility	p. 187
Principles of credibility assessment	p. 187
Telling their stories	p. 190
Judicial assessments of credibility	p. 194
Country experts and credibility assessments	p. 198
Medical experts and credibility	p. 203
Experts and judicial hegemony	p. 208
Weighing expert evidence	p. 211
The notion of evidential weight	p. 211
Home Office Country Assessments	p. 212
Weighing expert evidence	p. 216
Bias and objectivity	p. 222
Oral expert evidence	p. 226
Multiple experts: the Karanakaran appeal	p. 229
Tribunals as experts	p. 233
Judicial pragmatism	p. 237
Reaching decisions	p. 239
Judicial reasoning	p. 239
The standard and burden of proof	p. 240
The 'chemistry of unanimity'	p. 243
Risk assessment in asylum decision making	p. 245
Determinations and decisions	p. 248
Risk, authority and expertise	p. 253
The social construction of risk	p. 253
The complicity of the expert	p. 257
One-way tickets v. The Sword of Damocles	p. 261
Postscript	p. 267
Bibliography	p. 271
Index	p. 287
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