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Summary
Although asylum has generated unparalleled levels of public and political concern over the past decade, there has been astonishingly little field research on the topic. This is a study of the legal process of claiming asylum from an anthropological perspective, focusing on the role of expert evidence from 'country experts' such as anthropologists. It describes how such evidence is used in assessments of asylum claims by the Home Office and by adjudicators and tribunals hearing asylum appeals. It compares uses of social scientific and medical evidence in legal decision-making and analyses anthropologically the legal uses of key concepts from the 1951 Refugee Convention, such as 'race', 'religion', and 'social group'. Evidence is drawn from field observation of more than 300 appeal hearings in London and Glasgow; from reported case law; and from interviews with immigration adjudicators, tribunal chairs, barristers and solicitors, as well as expert witnesses.
Author Biography
Anthony Good is Professor of Social Anthropology in Practice at Edinburgh University
Table of Contents
Foreword | p. xi |
Abbreviations | p. xiii |
Table of cases | p. xv |
Table of statutes | p. xxiii |
Table of statutory instruments | p. xxv |
Prologue: Tales of persecution | p. 1 |
Asylum as a social and political problem | p. 5 |
The emergence of the refugee | p. 5 |
The scale of the 'problem' | p. 7 |
Background to the research | p. 10 |
Anthropologists and lawyers | p. 15 |
The fall and rise of the anthropology of law | p. 15 |
Legal and anthropological discourses | p. 25 |
Anthropology in the courts | p. 34 |
Studying asylum | p. 39 |
Previous studies of asylum processes | p. 39 |
Research methods | p. 42 |
Convention refugees: an anthropological approach | p. 47 |
The Refugee Convention in the European Union | p. 47 |
UK interpretations of the 1951 Convention | p. 50 |
'Well-founded fear' | p. 51 |
'Of being persecuted' | p. 54 |
'For reasons of race' | p. 63 |
'Religion' | p. 66 |
'Nationality' | p. 73 |
'Membership of a particular social group' | p. 74 |
'Political opinion' | p. 84 |
'Outside the country of his nationality' | p. 87 |
'Unable [or] unwilling' | p. 87 |
Gender and sexuality | p. 91 |
UNHCR and IND: an overview | p. 96 |
Claiming asylum | p. 99 |
Processing and assessing applications | p. 99 |
Appeal hearings | p. 105 |
The hearing process | p. 109 |
Certification | p. 117 |
Tribunal hearings | p. 119 |
Outcomes | p. 122 |
Expert evidence | p. 129 |
'Objective evidence' | p. 129 |
A brief history of expert witnesses | p. 131 |
The duties of expert witnesses | p. 136 |
Reliability and admissibility of expert evidence | p. 140 |
Instructing 'country experts' | p. 146 |
Expert reports | p. 148 |
Interpretation | p. 153 |
Interpreters in the asylum process | p. 153 |
Interpretation problems | p. 157 |
The impact of interpreters on asylum hearings | p. 166 |
Cultural (mis)translation | p. 170 |
Translation and performance | p. 182 |
Assessing credibility | p. 187 |
Principles of credibility assessment | p. 187 |
Telling their stories | p. 190 |
Judicial assessments of credibility | p. 194 |
Country experts and credibility assessments | p. 198 |
Medical experts and credibility | p. 203 |
Experts and judicial hegemony | p. 208 |
Weighing expert evidence | p. 211 |
The notion of evidential weight | p. 211 |
Home Office Country Assessments | p. 212 |
Weighing expert evidence | p. 216 |
Bias and objectivity | p. 222 |
Oral expert evidence | p. 226 |
Multiple experts: the Karanakaran appeal | p. 229 |
Tribunals as experts | p. 233 |
Judicial pragmatism | p. 237 |
Reaching decisions | p. 239 |
Judicial reasoning | p. 239 |
The standard and burden of proof | p. 240 |
The 'chemistry of unanimity' | p. 243 |
Risk assessment in asylum decision making | p. 245 |
Determinations and decisions | p. 248 |
Risk, authority and expertise | p. 253 |
The social construction of risk | p. 253 |
The complicity of the expert | p. 257 |
One-way tickets v. The Sword of Damocles | p. 261 |
Postscript | p. 267 |
Bibliography | p. 271 |
Index | p. 287 |
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