Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how human rights court professionals and NGO advocacy officers maintain trust in the state when faced with evidence of state violence at European borders. Based on both cases, the paper argues to expand the notion of legal consciousness within the anthropology of the state.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how human rights court professionals and NGO advocacy officers maintain trust in the state when faced with evidence of state violence at European borders. The paper’s focus contributes an analysis of the bureaucratic apparatus of a human rights court and the political assumptions of a human rights advocacy strategy to the panel’s discussion of evidence. Approaching evidence through the lens of human rights litigation and advocacy, the paper asks how professionals maintain trust in the state when faced with evidence of border guards not always acting ‘state-like.’ To answer this question, the paper reflexively draws on involvement in two action research projects : one as a research consultant for a human rights NGO in a Southern European border state, the other as a member of a collective of civil society organizations, lawyers and researchers in the Cyprus-Lebanon-Syria pushback corridor. After setting out the institutional context for human rights litigation and advocacy against border violence, the paper first discusses how court professionals in Strasbourg draw on bureaucratic procedures in order to maintain trust both in and of member states of the Council of Europe. Second, the paper illustrates how human rights advocacy officers in Brussels draw on belief systems about the primordiality of international law for local bureaucratic practices in order to maintain trust in and of member state of the European Union. Drawing on both cases, the paper makes a case for expanding the notion of legal consciousness within the anthropology of the state.

Paper short abstract:

The implementation of more restrictive immigration policies led to major litigation in several U.S. courts. This paper asks how state representatives, legal professionals & people on the move negotiate in this legal arena ‘truth’ around the right to mobility or the nation-state’s right to expulsion.

Paper long abstract:

People on the move trying to access the U.S. asylum system have systematically been blocked from doing so through closed border policies implemented under the Trump administration. In this contribution, I draw on ethnographic engagement with one of those policies, the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). Declaring that persons seeking protection in the U.S. were doing so 'wrongfully' by issuing 'fraudulent asylum claims,' the policy expulsed and forced asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico throughout their asylum procedure. Several lawsuits challenged the policy over a period of three years. Through an ethnographic analysis of the legal activism before and during selected court cases around MPP, I examine the different types of evidence that are used in the court procedures to create 'truth', or to adhere to truths around the application of immigration law. Specifically, I investigate the claims for rights brought forward by asylum-seeking persons and their legal representatives. Building upon legal anthropology, I attend to the logics of law-in-the-making and its application on the ground, as well as resistance against it. Consequently, I elaborate on further moral and legal categories used in the governance of migration to either support the right to mobility or conversely the nation-state`s right to prevent entry to its territory. Thus, I take a closer look at ‘rightful’ victimhood and humanitarian reasoning used to challenge the ‘truth’ of the (il)legality of government practices and the power of bureaucratic discretion.

Paper short abstract:

The communication focuses on the participation of interpreters to the evaluation of credibility within the French asylum procedure, by analysing how they deal with both moral and organizational standards which are indirectly imposed by the institution.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic approaches to asylum bureaucracies have highlighted the importance of institutional encounters, which articulate sociomoral and organizational dynamics in the formation of decisions (Dahlvik, 2018; Affolter, 2021). But they have not focused on the role of interpreters in the process, while language researchers have demonstrated that it is crucial in the assessment of credibility (Maryns, Smith-Khan and Jacobs, 2023).

In France, at the Ofpra (Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides, the French first instance of the procedure), interpreters are now present in 90% of the interviews. But if their intervention is supposed to guarantee asylum seekers’ right to express themselves, they are confronted with the inquisitive and accelerated processing of applications. My communication will therefore analyze how the French institution has shaped the intervention of interpreters in the evaluation of credibility, according to moral standards of sincerity and managerial objectives of performance.

To this end, I will offer a sociohistorical scope on the institutionalization of interpreters’ function, based on interviews with professional interpreters and on (administrative) archive analysis. This perspective will be cross-fertilized with an analysis of their participation to the entextualization of asylum seekers’ words, which I will provide by comparing official transcripts of interviews (written by the caseworker) to personal ethnographic notes of the same interactions. I will thus offer an insight on the participation of interpreters in the construction of the administrative truth in the asylum process.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how Indian police accept or refuse to file complaints by Dalit ("untouchable") survivors of caste violence based on survivors' ability to perform a mode of masculinity that combines aggression with the embodiment of economic mobility and literacy.

Paper long abstract:

Criminological scholarship on postcolonial nation states has highlighted the historic link between legal recognition, and the performances of violent, male authority (Parmar, Earle, and Phillips 2022, 2023). Meanwhile, anthropologists have shown that a person’s perceived credibility as a narrator of authentic legal narratives tends to depend on the complex web of social aesthetics (Cabot 2013) that makes up an individual’s habitus. In this paper I explore how Indian police officers engage with the narratives of Dalits (former untouchables) who attempt to file complaints against upper-caste aggressors under India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act. The paper adopts the concept of rhetoric masculinity to analyse how police constables accept or refuse to file complaints of caste-based aggression brought forward by Dalit survivors of caste violence. I propose that for Dalits a convincing performance at the police station, which results in a successful complaint registration, hinges not merely the correct forms of documentary evidence, but on the projection of a particular mode of masculinity. This mode of masculinity, which must either be displayed by the survivors himself, or by accompanying male relatives, combines aggression (Sinha 1995) with the authoritative embodiment of economic upward mobility (Jauregui 2016), and markers of literacy (Cody 2013). When survivors fail to perform these markers, police officers declare them and their stories “untrustworthy”. This suggests that for legal actors trust in complainants narratives may often be based intangible webs of cultural and historical semiotics that escapes legal documentation, and generate moments of institutional discretion.

Paper short abstract:

How do asylum lawyers relate to the truth when providing advice to migrants? What role does trust play in the judicial socialization of lay clients? This paper explores the lawyer's strategies for training applicants, through the analysis of the sentence “I believe you, but judges won’t”.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore how asylum lawyers relate in practice to the truth when providing advice to migrants. Mainly, it questions the role of trust in the judicial socialization of lay clients. Based on ethnographic research conducted with lawyers who plead at the French National Court of Asylum, it discusses the strategies employed by the lawyer to bring out evidence from the applicant’s statements and to prepare him to answer the judges’ questions. It investigates the lawyer's reflexive methods, showing how he adjusts his strategies depending on the applicant’s story, personality, and sociological background. In particular, it examines how the lawyer addresses the truth issue with the practical purpose of making the request credible. The analysis focuses on one interaction in a law firm, where the lawyer prepares her client for the forthcoming hearing. The sentence “I believe you, but judges won’t”, pronounced by the lawyer, is analyzed as a key example of an expression of a productive contrast: a first-person rhetorical assertion of a belief to inspire the applicant’s trust and a third-person evocation of the judge’s possible divergent interpretation on the case. It shows that the lawyer refers to the judge’s point of view as a shifting strategy to express her own rationality and expertise. By so doing, the lawyer shows the path to her client to be a good applicant, who learns to see himself as the judge will see him.

Paper short abstract:

My paper explores how social and racial distance between judges and appellants shapes the allocation of social benefits in the United Kingdom. It relies on observations of hearings at the social security tribunals and on interviews with judges, appellants, legal services, and solicitors.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores how lay people turn to the tribunal to challenge the non-granting of welfare benefits in the United Kingdom. It specifically examines cases involving benefits that target people with disabilities or people who are not able to work because of health condition, in which judges – who are a panel of professional judges, doctors, and disability experts – make decisions about their health condition and their (in)ability to work and/or to perform different tasks (walking, feeding themselves, etc.). In this context, appellants are asked to produce evidence and to be consistent in their answers and in the medical documents they provide. My paper relies on observations of hearings at the social security tribunals and on interviews with judges, appellants, legal services, and solicitors. I argue the social and racial distance between the appellants and the judges creates misunderstandings and what judges define as “inconsistencies” in appellants’ discourse.

Paper short abstract:

In the Swiss naturalisation process, intimate relations (of racialised groups) become a lens for assessing candidates' ‘integration’. Councils use the interview as opportunity for “intimate exposure” (Meiu, 2020) through which women become a ‘benchmark’ for their family members' "integration”.

Paper long abstract:

Dahinden and Kristol (2020) engage with the naturalisation of spouses of Swiss citizens (who undergo a facilitated process). They show how access to citizenship is regulated by gendered, ethnicised and classed logic and heteronormative ideas of ‘good marriage’. My paper shows that these implicit criteria are also integral to the ordinary track’s assessment. Candidates hand in a dossier, which includes evidence about the fulfilment of naturalisation criteria. When criteria are fulfilled, candidates are invited to an interview in front of a council that assesses candidates’ ‘integration’ beyond the provided documentation. However, the information provided in the dossier can also enhance the naturalisation councils' mistrust (especially for members of racialised groups), which justifies the investigation of candidates’ intimate relations. In my paper, I show how through the idea of “intimate exposure” (Meiu, 2020) and imaginations of Swiss “gender-nativism” (Manser-Egli and Dahinden, 2023), women are turned into a ‘benchmark’ of their family members’ ‘integration’ who must transform the council members’ suspicion.

I will analyse the constellation of a husband naturalising without his wife. In this ‘suspicious case’, the council members believe having a tool of investigation by inviting the spouse who was not applying for naturalisation to the interview; the interview becomes an opportunity for “intimate exposure” (Meiu, 2020). Councils can follow up on their suspicion by their own observation during the interview, which promises the opportunity to reveal non-integration (centring around ideas around gender relations and “equality”).

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores what qualifies as evidence in socio-juridic spaces, as adivasi communities navigate claims-making processes in Telangana, India. It will illuminate the material practices through which documents are rendered “sound”, while also highlighting how they are subject to doubt

Paper long abstract:

Building on Weichselbraun’s work on bureaucratic objectivity (2020), this presentation examines what qualities and processes imbue bureaucratic documents with evidentiary qualities, and subsequently render them ‘sound’. Soundness, I argue, is produced through distinct bureaucratic writing practices that infuse these records with specific qualities: they embody a ‘presumed’ truth content, operate as proofs, and qualify as evidence. Thus, ‘sound’ records, despite errors of omission and commission, are perceived as bureaucratic documents with ‘an authoritative disinterested “truth”’ produced through ‘quantitative, routinised and technical knowledge practices’ (Weichselbraun 2020,121)

Taking land rights contestations and struggles as a point of entry, this presentation explores how adivasis or Schedule Tribe communities in Telangana, India, negotiate their claims to land within socio-juridic spaces, such as bureaucracies and courts. Focussing on select land documents— title deeds, land records and registries, maps as well as court records— I explore how competing claims to land are adjudicated. This allows me to demonstrate what makes certain documents “sound” as opposed to others, and how complex power relations of caste, class, religion and more permeate documents as well, rendering some more “valid” and “accurate” than others. Consequently, I show that while bureaucratic documents are considered important pieces of evidence, they are also malleable and susceptible to manipulation. In doing so, this presentation will elucidate how bureaucratic documents are sites of contestation; far from being neutral spaces, they partake in the production and sometimes even the undermining of ‘truth content’ in claims-making processes.