Paper short abstract:

With statistics not currently kept on faith-based cases, and minimal Home Office guidance, how do UK Immigration and Asylum Tribunals wrestle with the idea of faith and conversion? What does it mean to have "genuine" belief?

Paper long abstract:

Far-right groups are increasingly using social media to create a counter-discourse that seeks to create a certain "ideal type" of asylum-seeker: one who lies, cheats, and is otherwise not "genuine" (Trilling 2013). According to those working within the United Kingdom's Immigration and Asylum Tribunals (IACs), more and more Iranians are claiming asylum in the UK on the basis of religious conversion.

Questions in an asylum tribunal are extremely complex, and often directed—repeatedly—towards whether or not an asylum-seeker has "genuine" faith.. What guides these questions, and what While there has been guidance on credibility (UK Home Office 2015), and case law on religious assessments (e.g. SA (Iran) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department 2012), there is not yet guidance on religion. Further, Statistics on asylum cases based on religion are impossible hard to come by: the UK Home Office has only in November 2017 begun releasing data on one kind of asylum claim (sexuality), with a 12% margin of error (Home Office 2017). With statistics not currently kept on faith-based cases, and minimal Home Office guidance, how do the IACs wrestle with the idea of faith and conversion? What does it mean to have "genuine" belief? Further, what kinds of communities are created around the discourse of faith and asylum (Anderson 2006)?

Relying on fieldwork in Manchester tribunals, I contend that political anthropology has the ability to provide nuance to monolithic Home Office considerations of "genuine"-ness, as well as public discourse of what constitutes a "genuine" asylum-seeker.