For this last blog post, I must confess that I had 2
ideas that have been in my mind after the last seminar: first one related to the
subjectivity of asylum officer’s decision in granting the refugee status to a
person, and the second one related to the life of a person after being legal declared
refugee – the struggle of establishing a normal life, with kids, friends and sense
of belonging in the world [“The most important part of being a refugee is being
a good loser”, How to be a good loser].
But I stopped at the first topic, trying to understand
how the system is working. So, I did a bit of research on the internet because
I didn’t understand from the movie “Well-founded fear” how an officer can assess
the credibility of the person who left his/her country, family, friends, etc,
in order to have a normal life. From that movie,
I will give more details regarding U.S. because the
movie was about it and because I found out more information on their system. This
institution, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, gives an explicit
training for the person that is willing to become an office, but the fact is
that I didn’t find anything related to the educational and background
experience on their website. The only clear answer to my question I found on
another website, which is not an official point of view. Here, it is written
that the candidate should “hold a college
or university degree, preferably a master's, law degree, or doctorate degree.
The subject of the degree should align with immigration topics; political science,
for example, would be an acceptable field of study for someone who plans to
become an asylum officer. The other option is to build up experience in the
civil service by working in other positions within the immigration department
and achieving a civil service rank high enough to apply for a job opening.”
After being accepted for this job and after the training step, the new officer
starts to work under the supervision. So, from here, I can understand that
there is a so-called structured process and some kind of criteria for someone
to become such a powerful authority in whose hands, he/she has the life of
others.
Besides this, I think there is a more important
question: how these persons, even if they are trained, can see the truth in
other’s speech? How is possible for them to see the credibility or not in one
application? I found out, that during this training, there is a module called “Credibility”,
in which there are some detailed explanations which include the factors for
assessing the credibility of an applicant’s testimony, some examples of questions
or affirmations through which the offices should put the applicant in a tough
situation – remembering bad things in his/her life, tortures, sufferings, describing
in detail happenings when they were beaten(“if
the applicant does not provide a reasonable amount of detail about an incident
when asked specific questions, you must inform the applicant of your concerns”).
In this training, they have been given also some examples of ‘how to do’ in
some kinds of situations, which in my opinion are more or less ambiguous and gives
the applicant strong emotional feelings: stress and anxiety because they know
that the interview is seen very harsh and difficult to be passed:
“Example
(Incorrect
Adverse Credibility Finding Due to Lack of Detail)
The applicant claimed that she was raped, but could
not provide a description of the clothes the assailant was wearing.”
Then, passing to the Consistency chapter, it is split
in two different concepts: Internal and External Consistency. The first one is
about the material facts, documents, events in which the officer should see how
well the evidence fits together and whether it contradicts or not. In this
subchapter, it is also written about the emotions, feelings of the applicant
when assessing the consistency and coherence in telling his/her story:
“you should watch for the level of detail and the introduction
of inconsistencies, keeping in mind at all times that there may be mitigating circumstances
in some cases, such as mental or emotional trauma, inarticulateness, fear, or
mistrust of authorities”.
The second consistency is about the information about
the country of origin, known facts and other piece of evidence. My rhetorical
question in this situation is: how a college degree person can have knowledge
about the latest events that happened in the other part of the world and how a person
with law degree can interpret and understand such events from a social, ethnographic,
ethnological and anthropological point of view?! Some extra advices are here:
“Countries' circumstances can change rapidly, and the
most recent COI (country of origin information) may not reflect the current
situation. Also, use caution in evaluating an applicant's lack of knowledge regarding
events or organizations in his or her country.”
Turning to the Plausibility subchapter, there are some
practical exercises which are more than extreme and in my opinion, very improbable
to happen in actual stories. For example,
“A university-educated man said he spoke Punjabi,
Hindi, Bengali, and English, could not read or write Punjabi, although he
claimed to have lived in Punjab and operated a business there for eight years.
Plausible or implausible? ------
Explain: ------------ “
And
the steps regarding the Credibility determinations are 4 more in this Training
module which more or less incomplete and with very different examples from what
is happening in reality.
Returning
to the movie that I have seen, the scenes presented were far different from some
information and advices that I have found in this supplement about the training.
Personally,
I realized it is put so much confidence on the power of subjective decision of
the officer and that’s why it’s more like a lottery – “you can get a good or a bad officer”. The officers usually make unbiased
assumptions and speculations in order to make their own story in their minds. This system is flawed, by human instinct, character judgment,
intuitions and the nature of emotions.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_6gbFPjVDoxbFROVU1xeTRjOUU/edit
(Credibility - Training Module)
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