Asylum Claims Research Articles

“As queer refugees, we are out of category, we do not belong to one, or the other”: LGBTIQ+ refugees’ experiences in “ambivalent” queer spaces

ABSTRACT While over the last twenty years, geographers of sexuality have explored the racialization of queer spaces, the experiences of LGBTIQ+ refugees in those spaces are rather absent in these studies. At the same time, while in recent years there has been an increasing amount of research on LGBTIQ+ asylum in Europe and beyond, the social experiences of LGBTIQ+ claimants and refugees in their host countries, including queer spaces, have only recently started to be examined. Drawing on research carried out in Germany, Italy and the UK, this article explores LGBTIQ+ refugees’ experiences in different spaces such as LGBTIQ+ support groups and night-time leisure spaces, as well as intimate relationships. The article argues that these are “ambivalent” spaces for LGBTIQ+ asylum claimants and refugees and that to fully understand these spatial experiences, we need to look at the inter-dynamic relationship between gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, “race”, religion and “refugeeness”.

Dilemmas of Immigrant Asylum Claims for Expert Witnesses

AbstractExpert witnesses are key players in immigration asylum proceedings. In many cases, their testimony is the difference between prompt deportation and some form of relief. However, political and economic structures overdetermine the factual and legal dimensions of immigrant asylum claims. The U.S. immigration system from its inception has been heavily politicized and discriminatory. The problem has become even more pronounced since the election of Donald Trump as president. This article examines political, economic, and ethical dilemmas of immigrant asylum claims for expert witnesses. These include issues related to the caliber of judges and lawyers, the geographic location of legal proceedings, challenges of telephonic versus in‐person testimony, moral questions regarding whether to participate in a rigged system, the weight given to expert opinions, unrealistic standards of evidence, obstacles to the presentation of social scientific data, and expert witness burnout.

Particular Social Group Trouble: Producing Categories of “Unworthy” Asylum Seekers

AbstractDeveloping ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity, and, even, contradiction. In the asylum courtroom, however, the law looks for certainty, clear percentages of likelihood of harm, and general, essential claims that a given people/country are a particular way. In this essay, I reflect on the ways in which the asylum system, by requiring that individuals be at risk because of their category (particular social group with immutable characteristics), casts other categories of people as inherently violent. I am particularly concerned with this dynamic in terms of gender‐based violence claims, where women's very real fears of domestic abuse in Honduras are frequently argued in such a way that serves to reinforce the idea that Central American men are uniquely violent. This, then, undercuts the asylum claims of young Honduran men who are, at the same time, those most likely to be killed upon deportation.

Generalised push-back practices in Europe

In recent years, more and more asylum seekers trying to reach the European Union (EU) have found themselves subjected to practices that contradict the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the democratic principles within the Dublin III Regulation. The inalienable right of those individuals to seek asylum is violated every time that the Member States’ national authorities subject them to irregular procedures and deny them their right to international protection without an individual assessment of their asylum claims. These practices are defined as push-backs. This brief outlines the ways in which asylum seekers are exposed to both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ push-backs by and between the Member States, while also underscoring the importance of safeguarding the physical safety and integrity of people seeking asylum. It offers case studies of EU countries where push-backs have become the new normal, and highlights the role of courts in remedying the wide-spreading push-backs practices. Within this context of generalized push-backs and executive backlash against European and domestic judgments finding violations of human rights, the withdrawal of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency from Hungary is an alarming signal for human rights protection. In the face of the rule of law and human rights challenges, was the Agency's withdrawal the most appropriate measure?. Finally, it asks whether the recent EU border procedure proposed in 2020 will have a positive or a negative impact on the right to seek asylum on the ground.

Introduction: Changes and Challenges in Expert Witnessing

AbstractThis Introduction highlights the dynamic nature of expert witnessing by highlighting some of the major areas of change and challenge: Our understanding of the immigrant and the asylum seeker reflected in changing legal categorizations, changing conditions in sending and receiving countries, and the changing and expanding field of anthropology that provides new critiques, materials, and perspectives for anthropologists as expert witnesses. Expert witnessing is a challenging and rewarding area of application, which may also contribute to anthropological theory and influence the legal framework in which asylum claims are adjudicated.

Barriers and challenges around the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers in Chile.

Asylum and refuge in Chile h¬ave received limited attention in policymaking and academia, and there is scarce evidence on their mental health needs and outcomes. Studies on mental healthcare access for international migrants suggest systemic barriers linked to costs and coverage, administrative issues, and adequacy of services. Today, we see that asylum and refuge is an emerging topic in Chile, which opens up the challenges around the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers. This topic is gaining visibility due to increased asylum claims over the past ten years, making it an urgent topic at a policy level. An exploratory qualitative study was conducted in 2018 on the health and social needs of asylum seekers and refugees from Latin America in Chile. This study indicated a general lack of knowledge on the mental health needs of refugees and asylum seekers and Chile and a lack of training in mental health professionals to address specific needs. Consequently, the health needs of these people remain largely unaddressed in terms of the number of available services and the relevance and pertinence of the services delivered. As Chile is positioning itself as a receiving country of refugees and asylum seekers in Latin America and the Caribbean, there is an opportunity to "do better" and adequately address the mental health of these marginalized populations.

Truth and Responsibility in Expert Witnessing

AbstractProviding expert testimony in asylum proceedings for mentally ill Mexicans, we are regularly asked to reduce individual subjects to diagnostic categories and an entire country to one of its most dysfunctional institutions. How, attorneys and judges ask us, does Mexican “culture”—through its institutions and psychiatric hospitals—treat the mentally ill? To adjudicators of asylum claims, there must be a clear and often singular “truth.” As Nikolas Rose has argued, however, “Truth is always enthroned in acts of violence.” This essay grapples with a question inherent to this work: to whom—and to what truths—are anthropological expert witnesses responsible?

Data as a Lens for Understanding what Constitutes Credibility in Asylum Decision-making

In asylum decision-making, legal authorities rely on the criterion "credibility" as a measure for determining whether an individual has a legitimate asylum claim; that is, whether they have a well-founded fear of persecution upon returning to their country of origin. Nation states, international institutions, and NGOs increasingly seek to leverage data-driven technologies to support such decisions, deploying processes of data cleaning, contestation, and interpretation. We qualitatively analyzed 50 asylum cases to understand how the asylum decision-making process in Denmark leverages data to configure individuals as credible (or not). In this context, data can vary from the applicant's testimony to data acquired on the applicant from registers and alphanumerical data. Our findings suggest that legal authorities assess credibility through a largely discretionary practice, establishing certainty by ruling out divergence or contradiction between the different forms of data and documentation involved in an asylum case. As with other reclassification processes [following Bowker and Star 1999], credibility is an ambiguous prototypical concept for decision-makers to attempt certainty, especially important to consider in the design of data-driven technologies where stakeholders have differential power.

Care of the Immigrant Child.

Care of the Immigrant Child.

Rights Not Recognized: Applying the Right to Recognition as a Person before the Law to Pushbacks at International Borders

Abstract Rather than facilitating access to protection for those escaping persecution or seeking security, today’s State policies often aim to prevent individuals from ever reaching their territories. The goal of deterrence has been manifested in border militarization and externalization practices that block those in need of protection – frequently labelled as ‘irregular’ or ‘illegal’ migrants – from accessing asylum and other protective procedures. In tandem, widespread State practices of informal, summary, and collective ‘pushbacks’ seek to remove individuals who do arrive in these State territories without individualized evaluations of their protection claims or adherence to any required procedure. This article argues that these pushbacks, which place affected individuals outside the framework of any applicable law and prevent them from accessing its protections, do more than obstruct asylum claims and violate the principle of non-refoulement. They strip individuals of their right to be recognized as persons before the law, protected by article 16 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After analysing the doctrine of the United Nations Human Rights Committee on article 16 in particular, and broadly exploring the interpretation of the right in other instruments that contain it, this article examines how the common processes and result of pushbacks implicate and degrade this right. It demonstrates that article 16 constitutes a critical protection against the increasing ‘rightlessness’ in which asylum seekers and other migrants often find themselves today. As such, it submits that evaluating pushbacks through the framework of the right to recognition as a person before the law, rather than through the lens of refoulement or expulsions alone, allows a better analysis of the multi-layered human rights impact of such practices, scrutinizes their use as a tactic in a deterrence-driven policy landscape, and facilitates a more critical evaluation of their (il)legality.

International Refugee Law in Crisis: Islands, Incarceration and Neo-Refoulement during COVID-19

Abstract Attempts by states to deter refugee movement have evolved to a point that routine and systematic breach of non-refoulement and associated human rights frequently constitutes a central pillar in their asylum architectures. The expansion of state policies and practices under which people seeking asylum are prevented from reaching safe places and lodging asylum claims has accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on examples from Australia and Europe, this article uses neo-refoulement—a concept introduced by geographers Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz—to signal not only the rise in pushbacks at land and sea borders, but also practices that occur well within the boundaries of sovereign territory. These include the use of island incarceration, fast-track border procedures, and denial of legal presence on sovereign territory, even where physical presence is achieved. Such measures have often been introduced under the pretext of responding to situations of ‘mass influx’. And yet, far from providing an adequate response to a so-called ‘refugee crisis’, they serve only to facilitate a greater humanitarian crisis.

Creating Uncertainty in the Governance of Arrival and Return: Target-group Constructions in Bavarian AnkER Facilities

AbstractGermany remains the number one destination for migrants in Europe. After 2015, following a backlash, burdens on municipalities and the inefficiency of the processing of asylum claims were widely problematized, as was the termination of residence and return of those deemed irregular migrants. Policymakers presented so-called AnkER centres, an acronym for central reception, decision-making, and repatriation facilities that translates as ‘anchor’ in German, as a solution that would accelerate procedures. Drawing from an interpretive case study of the AnkER pilots in Bavaria/Germany, we scrutinize meaning-making as reflected in contested constructions of target groups and identify the complex rationales of belonging shared by different ‘communities of meaning’ that pose a challenge to the promise of certainty declared in official documents.

«On fait du travail social en fait» : Perceptions de leur rôle par les avocat‑e‑s dans le cadre du processus de détermination du statut de réfugié

AbstractThe collaborative involvement of legal and healthcare professionals is often crucial when managing the consequences of the difficult experiences of those seeking asylum and the impact of these on the construction of the asylum application itself. While such collaboration is not always possible, this article focuses on the experiences of lawyers specialized in immigration law, who are often faced with challenges that do not fall strictly within the legal sphere but must be understood in order to support a successful asylum claim. This article examines the different perceptions among these lawyers as to the scope and limits of their role in this context. Some place greater emphasis on the distinction between professions and the limits of each person’s role. Others appear to express a more nuanced perspective, proposing specific strategies to better manage certain aspects related to mental health in particular.

“Sexuality” through the Kaleidoscope: Sexual Orientation, Identity, and Behaviour in Asylum Claims in the United Kingdom

The asylum system is a key site in which disputes over “sexuality” are contested. In refugee status determinations, administrative bodies are required to determine the actual or perceived sexuality of a claimant. This article draws on eight semi-structured interviews with refugees who claimed asylum in the United Kingdom based on their sexual diversity to deconstruct the distinct conceptions of sexual orientation, identity, and behaviour prevalent within the asylum system. It argues that the UK system overly privileges identity, falsely construing this as determinative of other aspects of sexuality. In doing so, it proposes a new framework of sexual diversity as a more relativist and inclusive way of making sense of sexual difference.

African Asylum Seekers in Europe: The Interplay between Foreign Aid and Governance in Origin Countries

This paper empirically investigates the effects of governance quality on the number of African asylum seekers in Europe over the period 1996–2018 and evaluates the extent to which official development aid acts as a catalyst. With this purpose in mind, different gravity model specifications and estimation approaches have been employed. The obtained results suggest that the asylum flows are strongly determined by governance quality in the country of origin and that this effect does depend on the amount of foreign aid received from developed countries. Moreover, it is also found that development aid is only effective in reducing asylum applications coming from countries with good governance. Moreover, we find no differences in the estimated elasticity of foreign aid on asylum claims for the beneficiaries of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund (EUTF) for Africa, the main aim of which has been to improve living conditions of potential migrants in their countries of origin.

When our Paths Cross Again: The Supreme Court's Management of Related Asylum and Child Abduction Claims in G v G

This case note examines how the Supreme Court approached the complex problem of overlapping legal proceedings involving asylum claims and child abduction. It analyses the purposive approach taken by the Supreme Court in G v G to the determination of how a child, who has not independently claimed asylum, should be understood to have done so, and the ramifications of this for the child's legal status in any claim for their return under the Hague Convention on Child Abduction. It further seeks to address the novel approach by which the Supreme Court dealt with this problem. By formulating draft standard directions for the handling of such cases, the Court brought into focus questions about the limits of the judicial function of promoting good governance.

Judicial Review of Asylum Claims at the Border- Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam

In Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam [591 U.S. _____ (2020)], the Court examined the constitutionality of the expedited removal process, which precludes judicial review of asylum cla...

FULL STEAM AHEAD! ADVOCATING FOR MIGRANT YOUTH AND FAMILIES THROUGH ASYLUM EVALUATIONS

Following this Workshop, participants should be able to cite statistics on the scope of the current refugee crisis, understand the critical components of a forensic evaluation to support asylum claims of children and families fleeing torture and persecution, conduct a culturally sensitive and trauma-focused asylum interview, compose a report that can be used in court, and engage with local immigration attorneys and grassroots organizations to begin this work.

Trends in the qualification of asylum claims related to gender-based violence under international and European Law

ABSTRACT Sexual and gender-related violence are widely regarded as serious violations of human rights. Notwithstanding, those who apply for asylum and invoke violence as a basis of their claim face difficulties in obtaining international protection. This may be due to the lack of trust in the applicant’s credibility, the nature of the evidence, lack of official information on incidents of gender violence, or the inclination of asylum countries not to become involved in ‘private matters’. This article analyses the trends in adjudication of asylum claims related to gender-based violence. In particular, it examines the recent European and national case law on asylum claims related to female genital mutilation, domestic violence and trafficking. It explores possible solutions to obstacles for securing international protection in such claims through various remedies. The authors note that the EU legislative developments do not eliminate these obstacles. At the same time, attempts in various national jurisdictions to dismiss gender-based claims as a ‘private matter’ are being challenged; there is now recognition that states have a positive obligation to ensure the protection of an individual’s basic rights, in particular through the application of ECtHR case law. These developments suggest positive trends towards protecting the applicants with gender-related claims.

To fail an asylum seeker: Time, space and legal events

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.