The Asylum Speaker

Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure

Katrijn Maryns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317641704
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Drawing on first-hand ethnographic data, field interviews with interpreters, interviewers and decision-makers, observations and off-record comments, The Asylum Speaker examines discursive processes in the asylum procedure and the impact these processes may have on the determination of refugee status. The book starts from the assumption that far-reaching legal decisions often have to be made on very limited grounds. Unable to submit any evidence to substantiate their case, the only chance that many asylum seekers have is to argue their case during the oral hearings with public officials at the different asylum agencies. Maryns investigates the performance of the asylum seeker during these interviews and analyzes the relationship between narrative structuring and gradations of linguistic competence. She explores a number of related questions: first, how the interaction between applicants and public officials proceeds; second, how this interaction forms the discursive input into long and complicated textual trajectories, and third, how the outcome of these discursive processes affects the assessment of asylum applications.

Maryns demonstrates how propositional aspects play a crucial role in the asylum procedure whereas little attention is paid to narrative-linguistic diversity and multilingual speaker repertoires. Her analysis reveals how insufficient insight into the linguistic structure and narrative features of the asylum account often results in a deficient processing of important details.

1. Text Trajectories

1.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I focus on the assimilation of asylum seekers’ accounts to institutional standards of textuality in the information processing procedure. It is my intention to lay bare the entire trajectory asylum seekers have to cover in the procedure as their file moves from one stage of investigation to the next. As this chapter is therefore necessarily long, I shall first sketch its general structure.

The organization of the chapter follows the framework sketched in the introduction covering the different stages of investigation in the asylum procedure (annex 1). My discussion proceeds according to the two main phases of investigation making up the procedure viz. the investigation of admissibility and the investigation of the merit of the application. As could be seen in the introduction, each of these phases comprises two stages of investigation in which different asylum agencies are involved: the DVZ and the CGVS (phase 1) and the CGVS and the VBV (phase 2). In the course of my fieldwork period, I was given the opportunity to follow three asylum seekers in their trajectory from the DVZ investigation of admis-sibility to their urgent appeal at the CGVS (phase 1) and I have selected one of these cases for analysis (the case Koulagna). Each of the three cases however, were declared inadmissible for further investigation at the CGVS. Within the boundaries of my fieldwork period I did not get the chance to follow the trajectory of an asylum seeker who moved from the first to the second phase of investigation (several reasons for this are discussed in my introduction to section 1.5). Therefore, for my analysis of the second phase of investigation, I introduce three more cases: the investigation of the merit of the application at the CGVS (the case Karifa) and the urgent appeal against non-recognition at the VBV (the case Ebou and the case Essoh). Thus, the chapter is organized in the following way:

Phase one: the investigation of the admissibility of the application

1.2 The investigation of admissibility at the DVZ: The case Koulagna (1)

1.3 The urgent appeal at the CGVS: The case Koulagna (2)

1.4 Recapitulation phase 1: The admissibility of the case

Phase two: the investigation of the merit of the application

1.5 The investigation of the merit at the CGVS: The case Karifa

1.6 The urgent appeal at the VBV: The case Ebou/The case Essoh

1.7 Recapitulation phase 2: the investigation of the merit of the application

By way of general recapitulation, I shall present some of the main features characterizing each of the different procedural stages of investigation side by side.

As mentioned before, this data section is necessarily long as it covers the different stages of investigation. It will be seen that at each of these stages, applicants are faced with the same problems over and over again (their inability to meet institutional requirements of factual detail, to stick to a temporal order of the events or to explain contextually dense passages of their account). I have chosen for an exhaustive representation of these problems as they turn up in the data. The recurring patterns in the analysis are in this way indexical of the applicant experience.

PHASE 1: The investigation of admissibility

For my analysis of the admissibility stage at the DVZ and the CGVS, I shall investigate the application of an asylum seeker who comes from the English-speaking part of Cameroon (the case Koulagna). The main reason why I have selected this case for detailed analysis is the fact it is one of the three cases for which I had the opportunity to follow the applicant as he moved from the first to the second stage in the procedure. The analysis of the case sheds a light on the tension between the first and the second interview and more particularly on the way in which this tension is perceived by the participants in the interaction.

Let me sketch an overview of the applicant’s procedural trajectory (annex 4). The applicant applies for asylum at the DVZ. On the basis of the first interview at the DVZ, the application is declared inadmissible. The applicant then lodges an urgent appeal against the DVZ decision at the CGVS. The CGVS rules against the appeal, i.e. the applicant gets a ‘confirming decision’ that agrees with the DVZ’s first decision. This means that the application for asylum cannot be investigated on its merit. The applicant then contests his CGVS decision at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court does not suspend the CGVS decision and the procedure is closed.

The applicant is a middle-aged man from the English-speaking part of Cameroon who has decided to do his interviews in English. His language choice gives rise to direct interaction with the official, without the intervention of an interpreter. In many African cases, English is used as a code for direct interaction between officials and applicants at the DVZ and the CGVS. There is an unwritten agreement between the DVZ/CGVS and the Supreme Court according to which the officials themselves can function as interpreters for English, unless the lawyer and/or the applicant argue that the official is not sufficiently proficient in English (such statements are rarely made in practice). Although English is not an official language in Belgium, many Belgians are able to express themselves fairly well in English – they are exposed to English at school and in the media (radio, television, films). The question is to what extent this non-native speaker variety of English suffices for an accurate understanding and representation of an account as complex as that of the asylum seeker. Moreover, the officials’ nonnative speaker variety is confronted with the African English variety of the applicant. In other words, although the applicant and the official both identify their code as ‘English’, this is for both a non-native variety that has become subject to interference from the other codes making up their repertoires. Therefore, as the analysis will show, English as a ‘standard language’ does not satisfy as lingua franca for the exchange of information. The interference of elements from the interlocutors’ highly different repertoires causes important information to be misinterpreted or to get lost. Moreover, it will be illustrated that although both varieties, the African and the European variety, are non-native varieties of English, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Encounters
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Symbols and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Text Trajectories
• 2. Linguistic Diversity
• 3. Rehearsed Narratives
• 4. Discussion
• References
• Annexes
• Index