Electronic Immigration Network

@ein-website.bsky.social

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Registered charity providing information on immigration, asylum and refugee law at https://www.ein.org.uk. Online since 1998.

Appearing on Radio 4 this morning to comment on the government's proposal to remove judges from the asylum appeals process, I was followed by Jo White, Labour MP and chair of the Red Wall Caucus, who referred to immigration lawyers and said:

"you see the ambulance chasers out there and I think for many solicitors it's a licence to print money..."

Not only is this a terrible insult to hardworking immigration lawyers and advisors across the country, it's a fabrication; ignorant & careless commentary like this suggests Ms White does not understand the sector and is probably bereft of any real ideas. That she is happy to go on national radio and use the sort of language known to fuel discontent in the hope that this plays out well at the next election, putting the legal profession and NGOs at even more risk than already faced, is appalling.

If I was unsure whether these new plans are an attack on the judiciary, Ms White leaves us in little doubt. And it's not just the judiciary, it's the legal profession. That a Labour MP has no regard for the rights of people within its borders, for our democracy, or for upholding the rule of law, is deeply troubling.

This article examines the impact on legal processes of the need to use interpreters, drawing examples from refugee status determination procedures in the United Kingdom. It describes the roles played by interpreters in facilitating intercultural communication between asylum applicants and the administrative and legal actors responsible for assessing or defending their claims at the various stages of those procedures. The UK authorities' somewhat naïve expectations about the nature of the interpretation process display little understanding of the practical dilemmas that interpreters face. Much of the confusion and many of the barriers to communication created by the involvement of interpreters reflect the inherent untranslatability of particular notions, and so arise irrespective of the technical competence of the interpreters themselves. For example, dates may be reckoned using non-Gregorian calendars; terminologies for family relationships and parts of the body may be incongruent between the two languages; and there may be no exact indigenous legal equivalents to UK notions such as 'detention' or 'rape'. Different interpreters may therefore give different, though equally legitimate, translations of such terms, creating apparent 'inconsistencies' in the resulting translated accounts. Given the centrality of notions of credibility in asylum decision-making, even quite trivial divergencies over such matters may prove crucial.

We would go further however. There are serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system if artificial intelligence is misused. In those circumstances, practical and effective measures must now be taken by those within the legal profession with individual leadership responsibilities (such as heads of chambers and managing partners) and by those with the responsibility for regulating the provision of legal services. Those measures must ensure that every individual currently providing legal services within this jurisdiction (whenever and wherever they were qualified to do so) understands and complies with their professional and ethical obligations and their duties to the court if using artificial intelligence. For the future, in Hamid hearings such as these, the profession can expect the court to inquire whether those leadership responsibilities have been fulfilled.

The role of emotion in asylum processes is one that has gained attention in recent years. This article situates itself as a response to this emerging body of literature by shedding new light on how emotions shaped the asylum appeals of a group of former unaccompanied minors in England through the application of the new concept of "empathy gap." Five socio-legal themes are used to structure the analysis: (i) age disputes, (ii) credibility, (iii) affective ties, (iv) right to voice, and (v) precarious legal status. It is the first article to explore in depth what happens during the asylum appeals process for former unaccompanied minors in Britain and the first to consider how questions of emotion affect their lived experiences of, and the process of, legal proceedings. The article has wider implications for how social processes and relations and informal processes, in particular emotions, influence formal legal proceedings leading to potential for unfair outcomes. The article finds that, to avoid empathy-enhanced reasoning becoming yet another variable leading to inconsistency in the judicial process, systematic training and monitoring are required. These findings carry implications far beyond the immediate context of UK asylum tribunals by offering empirically informed insights for theory and practice regarding the role of emotion in judicial proceedings, and therefore have enduring relevance.