How the officials' styles of recording the asylum seekers' statements in reports affect the assessment of applications: the case of Belgian asylum agencies

Abstract

This paper aims at describing the styles of asylum officials when eliciting asylum seekers' narratives of persecution and recording them in the report of the hearing. In order to illustrate the effect of these styles on the assessment of the applicant's request, I analyze the recordings of first-stage hearings, their corresponding records, and the asylum agency's decisions, which I gathered during fieldwork in the Belgian asylum agencies between 2004 and 2007. I distinguish in my corpus two different styles of officials interacting with applicants: and elicitative. The two styles are associated with two different techniques of drafting the reports, i.e., simultaneous and mediated. The analysis of my data reveals that officials employing an elicitative-mediated style delete assessment-relevant elements of the applicant's oral narrative of the persecution. © 2011 Walter de Gruyter.