Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony

In this book, legal, biomedical, psychosocial, and social science scholars and practitioners offer the first comparative account of the increasing dependence on expertise in the asylum and refugee status determination process. This volume presents a comprehensive study of the relevance of experts, as mediators of culture, who are called upon to corroborate, substantiate credibility, and serve as translators in the face of confusing legal standards that require proof of new forms and reasons for persecution around the globe. The authors provide insights into the evidentiary burdens on asylum seekers and the expanding role of expertise in the forms of country-conditions reports, biomedical and psychiatric evaluations, and the emerging field of forensic linguistic analysis in response to emerging forms of persecution, such as gender-based or sexuality-based persecution.

Part I. Sociocultural Inconsistency and the Contours of Expertise: 1. Reconstructing Babel: bridging cultural dissonance between asylum seekers and asylum adjudicators Bruce J. Einhorn and S. Megan Berthold; 2. Recovering the sociological identity of asylum seekers: language analysis for determining national origin in the EU Noé Mahop Kam; 3. Research and testimony in the 'rape capital of the world': experts and evidence in DRC asylum claims Galya B. Ruffer; 4. Beyond expert witnessing: interdisciplinary practice in representing rape survivors in asylum cases Miriam Marton; 5. Anthropological evidence and 'country-of-origin information' in British asylum courts Anthony Good; Part II. Practices and Technologies for Medico-Psycho Expertise: 6. Expert as aid and impediment: navigating barriers to effective asylum representation Sabrineh Ardalan; 7. Documenting torture sequelae: the Weill Cornell model for forensic evaluation, capacity building, and medical education Khatiya Chelidze, Nicole Sirotin, Margaret Fabiszak, Terri Edersheim, Alexandra Tatum, Taryn Clark, Luis Villegas, Patriss Wais Moradi and Joanne Ahola; 8. Incredible until proven credible: mental-health-expert testimony and systemic and cultural challenges for asylum applicants Hawthorne Smith, Stuart L. Lustig and David Gangsei; 9. Importing forensic biomedicine into asylum adjudication: genetic ancestry and isotope testing in the UK Richard Tutton, Christine Hauskeller and Steven Sturdy; 10. 'Health tourism' or 'atrocious barbarism'?: Contextualizing migrant agency, expertise, and humanitarian medical practice Benjamin N. Lawrance.

Benjamin N. Lawrance is the Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr Endowed Chair in International Studies of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has authored eight books, most recently Amistad's Orphans (2014) and Trafficking in Slavery's Wake (2012). Lawrance is a legal consultant and has served as an expert witness for more than two hundred and fifty West African asylum claims in fifteen countries. His research is situated at the dynamic interdisciplinary intersection of history, anthropology, and sociology and is focused on international mobilities, including migration, smuggling, trafficking, forced marriage, and refugee movements.
Galya Ruffer is Director of International Studies and the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies housed at the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois. Her work centers on refugee rights and protection, regional understandings of the root causes of conflict and refugee crises, and the rule of law and the process of international justice, with a particular focus on the Great Lakes region of Africa. She serves on the executive committee for the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration and is a vice chair of the American Bar Association International Refugee Law Committee. Aside from her academic work, she has worked as an immigration attorney representing political asylum claimants both as a solo practitioner and as a pro bono attorney.