True lies

The Geneva Convention stipulates that a refugee is someone with a 'well founded fear of persecution' based on race, nationality, religion etc.

The difficulty is proving that this fear exists with concrete evidence which will stand up in a court of law.

Often asylum seekers have left their homelands with as little as the clothes on their backs.

Official documents, if they ever existed, may have been lost or even seized along the way.

After the Fall of Saigon in 1975 for instance, many Vietnamese refugees arrived on the shores of foreign lands without anything but their horrific stories of oppression and persecution for their involvment, or lack of, in the Vietnam War.

How times have changed since then.

Previously governments have opened their borders and hearts to refugees like the Vietnamese. Now some are sending people away before it is even ascertained whether or not those people are genuine refugees.

The refusal of a boatload of asylum seekers from Libya off the Italian coast is just one example of this fierce protectionalist stance.

If you are allowed to enter, however, it certainly does not mean it's the end of the ordeal.

In the UK, providing you claim asylum within a certain time frame and know how to begin the process, your application is then, in due time, processed.

If you haven't been able to convince the Home Office that your case is genuine, you then have the right of an appeal.

Immigration judges have cited the lack of evidence to be the main reasons why appellants fail, again, at this stage.

All of this may change if it is formally recognised by the court system why traumatised people may not be able to give consistent and reliable evidence.

A recent study undertaken by the Centre of Law and Emotion investigated the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress disorder on asylum seekers and how the disorder can affect their ability to give consistent evidence.

Experts in the field have called on training to be provided to the judiciary so judges can make better decisions based on the study's results.

The reliability of of the court system to deliver justice to cases which may have been wrongly refused in the Home Office stage, depends on whether or not those reccomendations falls on empty ears.

Perphas then, decisions based on empirical evidence may replace a system where individual decisions have been formulated on what has been called a 'culture of disbelief '.

Legal aid

I have spoken to various people from different organisations about the current asylum application process and when I ask interviewees why they think the system is unfair and inhumane, they quite often blame the legal profession.

What they mean is the apparent lack of quality solicitors who are willing to set aside some time, probably longer than the four to five hours allocated to them through legal aid, and investigate the case thoroughly and with the rigour that asylum cases need.

One lawyer admitted that it would actually take up to 20 hours for a solicitor to properly research and prepare an asylum seeker case.

Furthermore, the existence of 'Key Performance Indicators' mean law firms have to reach a certain level of successful appeals and if they fall below those quotas, they could lose the funding all together.

This results in more and more law firms who are reluctant to take on cases which they think have less than a 50% chance in winning.

Coupled with the fact that funding for legal aid on the whole has been reduced, it's no wonder that I only managed to find a small majority of law firms in the South which dealt with asylum law.

What this means is that if an asylum seeker is awarded controlled legal funding or legal aid, they only have a few precious hours with their solicitors.

The situation is complicated further when there are cultural and language difficulties to overcome. When the asylum seeker's case is finally relayed, recorded and fought out in court to be only dismissed, the lengthly process of appeal is yet another ring of fire to jump through.

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