What’s missing from legal geography and materialist studies of law? Absence and the assembling of asylum appeal hearings in Europe

Abstract

There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully-fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non-attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practised. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.

“What Is Truth?” Negotiating Christian Convert Asylum Seekers’ Credibility

“…This includes not understanding that the hearing is not just a "practice round" before the "real" hearing (Town 1 H7; cf. Gill et al 2020), and not being clear on the role of the professionals involved. For example, while interpreters ought to be independent, they can be seen as being associated with BAMF: one interpreter used a notepad with the BAMF logo on it (fieldnotes, Town 2020), and another interpreter greeted the BAMF representative as an old friend and had an open exchange about personal matters (fieldnotes, City 2020).…”

The Never‐Ending Road Towards the CEAS: Utopia, Teleology, and Depoliticisation in EU Asylum Policies

“…In fact, although EU law provides for the right of appeal for asylum seekers who receive a negative first instance decision, what an appeal is and how it is practically implemented depends on member states' justice systems, which are not affected by the harmonisation of asylum procedures. Accordingly, differences exist across-and often within-countries concerning the use of in-person hearings as opposed to paper procedures, the publicness of asylum hearings, and the degree of centralisation of adjudication processes (Gill et al, 2020).…”

Legal geography III: Evidence

“…This diverse body of work, influenced variously by the postmodern sociology of de Sousa Santos (1987), the materialist and ethnographic perspective offered by Latour (2010) or Butler's (2011) approach to performativity, seeks to foreground the ways in which attention to the actual unfolding of legal processes illuminates hitherto overlooked barriers to the fulfilment of justice. A recent powerful example is provided by Gill et al (2020) in their study of asylum appeals hearings in Europe, work that illustrates how the arrangement of legal proceedings -the compilation of evidence, the spatial organisation of the hearings and the arrangement of who can speak when -shapes the outcomes of cases and the attitudes of participants as to whether justice has been served. Evidence lies at the heart of these deliberations, and it is worth quoting their findings at length: Many of the hearings we observed turned on documentary evidence, and we became aware of a diverse and contested spatial political economy of the assembling of evidence to support asylum claims.…”

“…It is not enough, then, to simply note the differences in doctrinal approaches to admissibility across space we need to think of how questions of place, embodiment and materiality intersect in the conversion of matter or speech into evidence. Such approaches highlight inter alia the mundane barriers to the provision of evidence (Gill et al, 2020), the gendered nature of evidence production (Hunter, 1996) and the ways in which settler colonial legal system privilege certain claims to truth (Blomley, 2015;Pahuja, 2011). As with the innovations of international law, we can also trace the role of technological and legal changes in shaping the geographies of evidence, as global financial crime, cybercrime and emerging forensic techniques open new possibilities for where, what and how evidence is performed (Gregory, 2018;Sharp, 2020).…”