Credibility in Refugee Status Determination: Alternatives to Hope

Credibility in Refugee Status Determination: Alternatives to Hope - Keynote speech with Hillary Evans Cameron

Our research community has worked for decades to reduce the risk that refugee claimants will be wrongly disbelieved and sent home to persecution. Now international refugee protection is being dismantled. Should our focus shift? And for our work to have meaning, must we hold out hope that the non-refoulement principle will triumph?

Programme:

This event is open to the public and all interested are welcome to join.

Speaker:

Hilary Evans Cameron is an Associate Professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law in Toronto, Canada. She teaches Evidence Law, Administrative Law and Advanced Legal Research and Writing. A former litigator who represented refugee claimants for a decade, she holds a doctorate in refugee law from the University of Toronto. 

Much of Prof. Evans Cameron’s research centres on fact-finding, with a focus on deception judgments in refugee status rejections. She explores questions at the intersection of law and psychology: How do decision-makers decide that a refugee claimant is lying? What inferences do they rely on to justify these conclusions? What assumptions underlie these inferences, and how well-founded are these assumptions? Her work in legal logics explores the principles that guide fact-finding in a courtroom or a hearing room: What structures constrain the drawing of factual conclusions from evidence, and what normative principles should guide the development of these structures? Beyond this, Prof. Evans Cameron has written about administrative law, pedagogy, pseudoscience, and the coming of AI to refugee hearings. 

Prof. Evans Cameron is the author of many publications, including a book about the law of fact-finding in refugee status decision-making (Refugee Law’s Fact-finding Crisis: Truth, Risk, and the Wrong Mistake, Cambridge 2018).