Torture Survivors in Asylum – Ignoring the Obvious

Abstract

ABSTRACT Torture is prohibited at all times and in all circumstances and states shall not return asylum seekers to their country of origin if there is any substantial risk of persecution upon return. The future risk of torture is therefore a central element in any asylum assessment. This notwithstanding, the torture experience of asylum seekers is seldom addressed during the asylum interview, hardly ever documented and rarely given particular consideration during the asylum assessment. Torture survivors seeking asylum are therefore in a paradoxical situation, on the one hand universally acknowledged to be highly vulnerable and potentially worthy of protection and medical rehabilitation, and on the other hand having their torture experiences under-communicated and ignored. Based on research into the Norwegian immigration authorities, I will explore how ignorance is produced and maintained in everyday interaction with asylum seekers through the theoretical lens of ignorance. I argue that, during the Norwegian asylum procedure, the current paradox of hyper-visibility versus failure to acknowledge the torture experience is caused by the street-level bureaucrats’ inability to give consequence to and make bureaucratic and procedural sense of the torture experience. This inability is owing to a number of individual and structural forms of ignorance that range from bureaucratic obfuscation and rearrangement of the knowledge – ignorance assemblages, the strategic ignoring of facts, to a lack of knowledge and competency and, as such, an inability to know. However, rather than concluding that immigration bureaucracies produce indifferent street-level bureaucrats, I document the many attempts to care and to do better that do as an integral part of the ignorance that permeates the asylum system.