ASYFAIR Germany dataset: asylum adjudication in Germany (2018/19)

The Project: ASYFAIR is a multi-disciplinary research project, employing a combination of methodologies to produce rich data sets on legal asylum procedures. The purpose of the study is to examine legal aspects of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which was reformed by the European Union in 2013 and that seeks to implement a set of standardise procedures of asylum determination. The ASYFAIR project offers the opportunity to assess progress towards harmonisation of asylum determination processes in Europe, and provides new conceptual frameworks with which to approach the dilemmas and risks of inconsistency in an area of law fraught with political controversy and uncertainty.

The ASYFAIR project examines legal appeal procedures at court determining asylum in Europe, and has collected first-hand qualitative and quantitative data at asylum courts in the UK, Germany, France, Austria and Belgium, as well as interview data in Italy and Greece. The project is at the interface between critical human geography, anthropology, border studies and law. Conceptually, ASYFAIR data connects to work on legal consistency, legal pluralism, the universalism and omnipresence of law, legal speeds, barriers to access to justice, the effects of waiting and delay in asylum claim determination, judicial worldviews and biases, the relative impotence of information in the face of legal reasoning, responsibility offloading from first instance to appeal procedures, the usefulness of judicial panels, and the frequency with which narratives are interpreted in court discourse.

The unique feature of the ASYFAIR project is that relatively little academic work has examined how asylum court hearings are conducted in practice. Aggregate data on outcomes (verdicts by judges) and general asylum data is available publicly or on request from courts, but there has been little scrutiny of the actual events during court hearings, obscuring procedural justice and inconsistency. ASYFAIR examines what happens during asylum appeal hearings, and explores how legal processes may vary according to factors such as the court location, the scheduling of hearings, legal and governmental representation in hearings, as well as factors such as gender, age and attire of individuals, the country of origin, native language and religion of asylum appellants, and certain demeanours of participants, and their (assumed) preparation for hearings. The quantitative data on Germany that this websites makes available offers a unique insight into legal procedures in asylum determination by presenting what is happening during asylum court hearings.

Methods
Methodology: ASYFAIR uses a variety of research methods. The primary data-collection is based on multi-sited, ethnographic observations of public asylum court hearings, as well as interviews. The data made available (ASYFAIR Germany Quantitative Data Set) is based on a quantitative survey conducted in conjuncture with ethnographic court observations at German courts from 2018-2019. The survey tool (ASYFAIR Germany Pro Forma) was composed by ASYFAIR researchers following a pilot study at courts in early 2018, and builds on the previous work in the UK by the ASYFAIR’s PI Dr. Nick Gill. The Pro Forma was completed by the researcher responsible for conducting ethnographic observations in Germany. The original .pdf file was editable, and completed electronically by the researcher, and the data from this survey tool was exported as a .xlxs file, and compiled in one .xlxs file, which was later analysed with the quantitative data mining software SPSS.

The data set is likely to be of interest both to academic communities like geographers, legal and border scholars, and anthropologists, as well as to policy makers and activists working in refugee status determination.