To access refugee protection in Australia and Canada, refugee applicants must speak. They must present their oral testimony in person, repeatedly and at length, unmediated by a legal representative or advocate, and in many cases without the benefit of documents, witnesses or other forms of evidence to verify their claims. This book is about the oral evidence that refugees are compelled to give, the stories they are required to narrate, and the genres of storytelling they are required to master during administrative oral hearings for the assessment of refugee status in Australia and Canada. This introductory chapter establishes the book’s central concerns, namely: what the presentation, interrogation and assessment of testimony during the oral hearing tell us about the refugee subject whom Refugee Convention-signatory states judge as authentic, credible and, ultimately, acceptable. It then carefully connects the demand for narrative within RSD with the intractable problems of credibility assessment. Finally, it interrogates the role of law, lawyers and interpreters in shaping the refugee testimony and analysis presented throughout the book.

This chapter addresses the history of the refugee oral hearing in Australia and Canada. It explains how and why the oral hearing became a central event within RSD processes in each jurisdiction and traces the role of refugee testimony up until the introduction of a quasi-independent administrative process for RSD and into the present day. In both countries, the introduction of statutory RSD procedures and an oral hearing represented a shift toward enhanced administrative rights and justice for onshore refugee arrivals. However, it also occurred in the context of an increasing state focus on the ‘genuineness’ of refugees and major reforms that sought to limit and control onshore refugee arrivals in both jurisdictions. The chapter then traces more recent reforms to RSD processes in Australia and Canada. This later history reveals that the ‘right’ to fair and independent decision-making processes has become increasingly constrained in both jurisdictions, and that limiting access to RSD has become a key means by which states enact policies of refugee deterrence and exclusion.

This chapter completes the book’s examination of the impossible narrative position faced by refugee applicants by examining how specific genres enter the hearing room and further determine the ‘authentic’ refugee that states are willing to accept. Drawing on Joseph R Slaughter’s engagement with the genre of human rights discourse, it argues that like the protagonist of the classic Bildungsroman and human rights narratives, refugee applicants are expected to narrate a linear progression from a non-citizen ‘outsider’ towards full civic incorporation through the seeking of protection and the resolution of refugee status. In this generic mode, refugee applicants were expected to present evidence as omniscient narrators with sovereignty over self and others, and the ability to account not only for their own actions but also the decisions and interior worlds of others. Crucially, the ‘good’ refugee’s story moves steadily towards complete resolution that is the determination of refugee status and the realisation of a liberal personhood, marked by self-possession and autonomy, and readiness to become a refugee-citizen.

The Conclusion returns to the book’s central questions and arguments. It considers the implications of the book’s findings for the conduct of oral hearings within RSD, and the impossibility of a just assessment of refugee applicants’ oral testimony against the current credibility criteria. While the aim of the book was not to advance precise reforms to RSD, in reflecting on what suggestions for reform arise, the Conclusion argues that if oral hearing must be a narrative occasion, it should be a more predictable one. Where applicants’ evidence is expected to fit within cognisable narrative forms, the hearing should provide the opportunity to meet these standards. However, such a reform would do nothing to address the narrative mandate traced and critiqued throughout the book. Finally, the Conclusion explores and holds open the possibility for certain texts and genres to present radical ways of imagining refugee narratives outside the strictures of refugee law, RSD and the extreme demands (and limits) currently placed on the testimony of refugee applicants.

This chapter argues that a distinct stock story of who refugees are and how they behave, which it describes as the ‘stock narrative of becoming a refugee’, featured throughout the hearings. This stock story is one version of how, when and why ‘genuine’ refugees decide to leave their home countries and seek refugee status in another state. The chapter analyses the extent to which this prescriptive narrative conforms with international and domestic definitions of refugee status, to show that the normative expectations embedded within the stock tale far exceed the legal basis for refugee protection. Nonetheless this story, with its distinct narrative form, was demanded of refugee applicants during oral hearings and structured how decision-makers tested and judged applicants’ evidence and credibility. While decision-makers frequently demanded evidence that conformed to the stock narrative of authentic refugeehood – or that applicants to account for deviations from this narrative – refugee applicants also implicitly or explicitly contested or resisted this demand when presenting their oral testimony.

This chapter introduces the book’s central argument, that narrative plays a key role in refugee decision-making and calls for a critical politics of narrative within RSD. The chapter closely engages with the theoretical insights of law and literature studies, and of outsider storytelling scholarship as articulated by critical race, Indigenous and feminist law scholars, to explain how narrative is implicated in RSD and in the politics of whom states deem the ‘credible’ and ‘acceptable’ refugee. It introduces the book’s methodology in further detail, alongside the dataset of fifteen oral hearings before the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board and the former Refugee Review Tribunal in Australia. The chapter goes on to articulate a working definition of the ‘model’ Anglo-European narrative form, which I argue shapes the reception and assessment of refugee testimony. The chapter finally address the barriers encountered in accessing refugee oral testimony, and the implications of such barriers for interrogation of the oral hearing as a site of narrative. In making a case for the disciplining role of narrative within refugee decision-making, this chapter critiques the celebration of story-telling as necessarily emancipatory or disruptive of law’s authority, and characterisations of narrative as distinct from legal discourse and power.

This chapter marks the book’s shift from examining the demand for a particular refugee story during the oral hearing, to considering how decision-makers used narratives to test and contest refugee applicants’ testimony. It presents a key finding from the hearings: that decision-makers often engaged in ‘narrative contests’ with the applicant, presenting their own counter-narratives of how events should have taken place if the story presented were to meet the credibility standard of plausibility. The chapter details how the criterion of ‘plausibility’ forges a direct link between credibility assessment and the narrative form, and also sets out the minimal law or policy that governs the testing of oral evidence during the hearing in Australia and Canada. As a result, decision-makers were relatively free to engage in a form of questioning that went beyond asking refugee applicants for information or explanation. Instead, they presented alternative, hypothetical accounts of how events would have taken place if the story (and by implication, the applicant) were credible. When engaging in these narrative contests, decision-makers’ narrative expectations were often deeply subjective, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. The chapter also reveals that in navigating these exchanges, certain applicants displayed high levels of agency and resistance vis-à-vis decision-makers’ own narrative assumptions and their vast power to direct evidence.

A core impediment to refugee applicants providing a credible narrative account of their claims to protection is the profound fragmentation and unpredictability of the structure, content and conduct of the oral hearing. This chapter argues that the conduct of the oral hearing severely fragmented applicants’ testimony in three key ways: reverse-order questioning; decision-makers’ abrupt subject switching during the hearing; and questions pertaining to time, sequencing and precise dates of events. This leads to the conclusion that applicants were both expected to present their oral evidence in a form that fulfilled the credibility criteria and the demand for narrative, and actively impeded in their efforts to do so. Further, where applicants displayed an ability to present evidence in a narrative form, in all but a minority of hearings this was done despite, rather than because of, the structure and setting of the hearing.