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.