In the five years I worked in refugee law, some of the most common and complicated legal challenges I encountered were questions regarding the 'truthfulness' or 'credibility' of an asylum seeker's claims. Despite examining the same evidence, different decision-makers can draw different conclusions about whether an asylum seeker is telling the truth.
Yet when determining whether or not an asylum seeker is a refugee — a process called 'refugee status determination', or 'RSD' — these subjective findings of credibility are pivotal. They can make the difference between a person being granted asylum or being turned away.
There's an old cliché in refugee law that refugees don't come with a note from their dictator. Asylum seekers don't carry indisputable evidence setting out precisely who they are, what has happened to them and why they fear harm. They will rarely have been the subject of press reports. Their personal experiences may not have been documented. And any witnesses to what they have lived through may be unwilling or unable to testify on their behalf.
Even information that is available, like information about the asylum seeker's country of origin, has its limits. Country information, or even information about the group, sect or party to which an asylum seeker belongs, will usually be in very general terms. It will not be sufficiently specific or detailed to confirm the experiences of any single individual. These challenges become even greater when an asylum seeker makes claims not just about what they have done, but about who they are and what they believe: their religion, their sexuality, their political beliefs.
When governments or the UNHCR carry out RSD, they hence make decisions with extraordinary consequences for the asylum seeker on the basis of very limited information about that person.
In practice, decisions about whether an asylum seeker is telling the truth are mostly made on the basis of the asylum seeker's own testimony. Decision-makers question asylum seekers about their lives and decide whether the answers seem 'credible'.
These decisions are very difficult. The techniques and presumptions we use in other legal proceedings, or in our daily lives, to decide if someone is telling the truth are often uniquely unsuited to RSD.
"Plausibility is not static across all cultures and all times. What seems absurd to a decision-maker in an air-conditioned Sydney office may bear no relation to lived experiences of warfare, captivity and abuse."
In other contexts we might look to consistency to decide whether