Reading the Stranger of Asylum Law: Legacies of Communication and Ethics

Abstract

In this paper I argue the way in which the UK asylum system currently functions, fails to legally and discursively acknowledge the UK’s culpability and contribution to contexts that generate refugees via, for example, legacies of colonialism and engagement in neoliberal economic practices. I claim that these legacies fundamentally and detrimentally impact on, and delineate the relationship between, asylum claimant and immigration judge. Responding to these legacies and the concurrent interpersonal impact, I draw on the work of Iris Marion Young and Emmanuel Levinas in order to reframe the relationships between the interlocutors. Using an ethical framework, I focus on the benefits that engaging with, and bearing responsibility for the ‘other’ may have on the provision of justice for refugees. I rely in part on Iris Marion Young’s understanding of a communicative ethics based on ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’, which is indebted to Levinas’ conceptualisation of the other—the other as unknowable, and irreducible, and to whom we are obligated—in order to address the place of an ethics of responsibility (Levinas 2006; Hand 1996). Young’s work unpacks the relationship between locutionary positions; she relies on generosity towards the other through what she terms ‘the gift’ (Young 1997). The ‘gift’ is a relational concept—‘opening up to the other person is always a gift; the trust to communicate cannot await the other person’s promise to reciprocate’ (Young 1997, 351). The gift’s relationship to asymmetrical reciprocity requires each party to recognize and be open to the ‘irreducible points of view of the other’ and understand the ‘irreversibility’ of their subject positions (Young 1997, 351). I make this tentative turn to ethics as a way of repositioning the relationship of law to the politics of responsibility, in a bid to foster an ethical response to the other that reaches beyond the asylum court.