The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers

Abstract

Whether through traditional law or modern torture, the body has always been a privileged site on which to demonstrate the evidence of power. But for immigrants, the poor, and, more generally, the dominated—all of whom have to prove their eligibility to certain social rights—it has also become the place that displays the evidence of truth. In France, as immigration control increases, asylum seekers are more and more submitted to the evaluation of their physical sequels and psychic traumas, as if their autobiographical accounts were not sufficient. In this article, we show how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) deal with the dilemmas posed by this situation, how they develop protocols standardizing their expertise, and how their medical authority progressively substitutes itself for the asylum seekers' word. In this process of objectification, it is the experience of the victims as political subjects that is progressively erased.

« Au milieu du chemin de notre vie »

“…12 Au sujet de l'expertise médicale 4 Dans l'expertise médicale, le médecin n'est plus chargé de soigner le patient, mais d' attester une vérité qui, faute de confiance en la parole des requérants, réside désormais dans leur corps ou dans leur psyché (Fassin et d'Halluin, 2005).…”

Biopolitical Citizenship in the Immigration Adjudication Process

“…In the United States, France, and other countries (Fassin and d'Halluin 2007;Helén and Lemke 2012;Ticktin 2011), a combination of increasingly restrictive immigration control policies (Menjívar and Abrego 2012) and fears of the spread of infectious diseases (Dara et al 2013) has prompted legislators to resort to biological and medical evidence as a means of sorting aspiring citizens. The underlying idea is that biomedicine does not lie: it offers absolute and transparent bases to grant or deny forms of citizenship.…”

“…Our analysis of biopolitical citizenship in U.S. immigration law advances scholarship on sociolegal citizenship by building on conceptualizations of immigration control that center on policy implementation via intermediary mechanisms, institutions, and social actors (Coutin 2000;Fassin and d'Halluin 2005;Gilboy 1991;Lakhani forthcoming;Marrow 2009;Menjívar and Abrego 2012). By analyzing how one group of intermediaries, attorneys, serve as brokers in the context of biomedical screening evaluations, we configure immigration lawyers as "agents and critics of law" (Coutin 2000:104;emphasis added).…”

“…They may be facilitated by mid-level state actors (e.g., nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) keen on culling benefits for a particular population of interest (Fassin 2009;Fassin and Rechtman 2009;James 2010;Kim 2011). Didier Fassin andEstelle d'Halluin (2005, 2007) note that medical certifiers affiliated with NGOs in France mobilize asylum seekers' biology through their physical bodies as evidence of their social experiences, in order to present them as worthy of state support and benefits (Ticktin 2006(Ticktin , 2011. In Ruth Fitzgerald's (2008:255) understanding of biopolitical citizenship, access to state resources depends on the development of "'lay' expertise" and ground-level collective support directed at state members with the power to grant or deny access to resources (Beckett and Hoffman 2005;Bumiller 2009).…”

When wounds travel

“…Such work has further demonstrated how medical and legal discourses about physical and psychological trauma have become central to the development of humanitarian logics and practices -especially in their recognition of victimhood and suffering in war-ridden societies and other situations of emergency (Allen 2009;Fassin and Rechtman 2009;James 2010;Feldman 2004;Kelly 2011;Ticktin 2006). In the humanitarian setting, the 'suffering body' has become the main legitimate source of such claim making, as a constellation of diagnostic tools, medical certificates, and therapeutics are often operationalized to identify the 'scarring' of war on individuals and communities (Fassin and D'halluin 2005), and mitigate their effects through a range of medical, legal, and/or psychosocial interventions. More specifically, in the context of displacement and asylum claims, the recognition of trauma and victim status are further instrumentalized to produce hierarchies of vulnerability within political and bureaucratic processes of resettlement for refugees and immigrants (Ticktin 2011).…”