Abstract
Legal geographers have recently highlighted the importance of attending to the interaction of time and space to understand law and its enactment. We build on these efforts to examine the spatiotemporal influences over the processes by which asylum claim determination procedures in Western industrialised countries seek to reconstruct past events for the purposes of deciding refugee claims. Two ‘common-sense’ beliefs underpin this reconstruction: that the occurrences leading to a fear of persecution can be isolated and that the veracity of an asylum claim is objectively independent from the process of uncovering it. We critically interrogate these assumptions by conceptualising the fears of people seeking asylum as Deleuzian ‘events’. Basing our argument on 41 interviews with people who have previously claimed asylum in the United Kingdom and firsthand accounts of asylum appeals, we explore the folding together of asylum ‘truths’ and the spatiotemporal processes by which they are arrived at, arguing that refused asylum claims are not simply detected by the process – they are produced by it.
Highlights
Who can be considered a refugee? According to Article 1(A)2 of the United Nations’ 1951 Convention, a refugee is a person who has fled their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular socialEPD: Society and Space 0(0)group or political opinion
We identify some of the spatiotemporal conditions in the present that can affect the way that events are actualised during asylum determination processes, with a particular focus on how the past and anticipated futures subsist within the present
Legal geographers are searching for new concepts that are capable of fusing attention to the simultaneous influence of space and time in the construction and performance of law (Braverman et al, 2014; Valverde, 2015)
Summary
Who can be considered a refugee? According to Article 1(A) of the United Nations’ 1951 Convention, a refugee is a person who has fled their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular socialEPD: Society and Space 0(0)group or political opinion. A person who is legally considered a refugee, is usually someone who has sufficiently proven their well-founded fear to an authority. Such an authority might be a supra-governmental organisation such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or the immigration and asylum department of a national government.. In countries that are signatories to the convention, the two major moments that accompany the refugee determination process are usually an interview with a government representative and, if the initial decision based on the interview is appealed, a legal reconsideration by a judge. Over 1,100,000 such decisions were made, of which just over 60% awarded some form of status recognition to the applicant (Gill and Good, 2018). 300,000 such decisions were made, with some form of recognition accorded to the appellant in over 30% of cases (Gill and Good, 2018)
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