In Denial: The UK’s Asylum Claims Backlog and the Failure of Credibility Assessments
In 2022, the backlog of asylum applications in the UK has grown to unprecedented levels, blamed largely on an increase in the number of asylum seekers arriving in small boats across the English Channel. However, this report argues that the backlog is not solely caused by numbers, but rather the way in which asylum claims are assessed is itself problematic and contributing to the backlog.
Specifically, the Home Office decides asylum claims by assessing their ‘credibility’. The UK is well-documented as having a high turnover rate of asylum decisions, and as many as 84% of these are overturned on the basis of incorrect credibility assessments.
This report submits that credibility assessments foster flawed decision-making, meaning that Home Office decision-makers fail to get it right the first time. Until the Home Office’s approach to credibility changes, decision turnover rates will remain high and the asylum claims backlog will continue to grow.
Claiming Asylum in the UK
The 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention requires signatory nations (which includes the UK) to grant asylum to refugees; persons unable to return to their home country or seek its protection ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted’. Asylum seekers must demonstrate that there is a ‘real risk’ of their well-founded fear of persecution materialising, and the Home Office assesses the credibility of such claims.
In practice, credibility assessments have been recognised as problematic for two reasons. Firstly, they introduce subjectivity into how Home Office decision-makers assess claims. Secondly, they present asylum seekers with improper procedural barriers that are exacerbated by the challenges of fleeing persecution.
Subjectivity
The ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ test provided by the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention is widely recognised as an objective test. However, credibility assessments often encourage a subjective focus on the credibility of asylum claimants themselves, rather than their application per se.
This subjective focus on claimants manifests in a number of ways. One example is knowledge testing; Home Office interviewers essentially test asylum seekers’ general knowledge on the subject which their persecution arises from, which has no bearing on whether a claimant is actually being persecuted.
Similarly, when Home Office decision makers assess credibility, they do so based on what they deem believable. This is problematic because decision-makers often have a lack of understanding about what is credible in the cultural context of the countries that asylum seekers are fleeing. As one critic puts it; ‘what seems plausible in relation to illiterate women in a village somewhere will differ from what we might deem plausible for Western women’. Thus, when deciding whether an account is credible, decision-makers are evaluating what is subjectively believable to them, with their world experience. To put it plainly, British decision-makers may struggle to view truthful accounts as credible because they cannot comprehend fully the dangerous conditions that asylum seekers are often fleeing.
Procedural Obstacles
Credibility assessments are procedurally problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it is evidentially challenging for asylum seekers to prove their credibility. The nature of fleeing persecution means that asylum seekers often find it difficult to obtain documents which support their accounts, as they may have been left behind or controlled by a hostile government.
Further, Home Office decision-makers often use a lack of documentary evidence to undermine other aspects of an asylum seeker’s account. This has been described as a ‘domino effect’; decision-makers focus on inconsistencies and seek to use these to undermine other elements of an asylum seeker’s account.
This occurs despite official Home Office guidance that ‘material facts must not be considered in isolation’, but considered holistically with all other available evidence. In practice, decision makers approach this backwards; they search for inconsistencies and use those as a basis to disregard otherwise sound evidence, rather than considering whether the whole package of information might render minor inconsistencies irrelevant.
Secondly, credibility assessments undermine the low standard of proof which should be applied to asylum applications. The standard must be low because the consequences of a wrong decision are grave - returning an asylum seeker to a life of persecution. This low standard of proof has been described by the United Nations (UN) as giving asylum seekers the ‘benefit of doubt’.
However, rather than giving claimants the benefit of doubt, the UN Refugee Agency has observed a ‘refusal mindset’ among Home Office decision makers, driven by a pervasive ‘agenda of disbelief’. For example, Home Office schemes have been used to award decision-makers with shopping vouchers for successfully defending appeals in court. As such, credibility assessments are weaponised against asylum applicants to cast doubt on their claims and wrongly refuse their applications.
Summary
The improper use of credibility assessments undermines the quality of Home Office decision-making. They foster subjectivity, which inhibits an objective, fair and accurate assessment of whether asylum seekers are facing persecution. Similarly, the credibility assessments present procedural obstacles, penalising asylum seekers for an unavoidable lack of evidence and measuring asylum claims against an inflated standard of proof.
At a time of strain for the asylum system, we must go beyond the numbers and recognise that the UK’s system of credibility assessments is not working. The Home Office must end the focus on credibility and help decision-makers get it right first time in order to end the spate of overturned decisions and begin clearing the backlog.