MOBILE - Mobility Law Open Lab with Keyvan Dorostkar

Re-Conceptualising the Relationship Between Fairness and Efficiency in Asylum Procedures

Presenter: Keyvan Dorostkar is a PhD candidate at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Presentation: This paper seeks to set a new research agenda, exploring how fairness and efficiency in refugee decision-making can be simultaneously advanced through an evidence-based approach to policy design.  The paper gathers data on over 200,000 individual asylum application lodged in Australia from 2013 to 2023, following each across the entire process. The core aim of this paper is to understand empirically how long asylum applications take to be finalised across each stage of the process and examine whether the restriction of procedural fairness rights throughout the procedures results in faster processing. Whilst the findings of this paper are limited to the Australian jurisdiction, this paper holds relevance and value for scholars and policy makers in other jurisdictions. Specifically, this paper examines the effect of restrictive procedures on the duration of asylum procedures. The empirical analysis in this paper challenges the long-held narrative and assumptions by states regarding the necessity of restrictive asylum procedures to increase efficiency. Additionally, the paper demonstrates the value that quantitative empirical data can provide in shaping national asylum procedures.

Time: 25 September 2025 14:00-15:15

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus + ONLINE

Online participation

For online participation, please contact MOBILE's intern Kamille at xdm242@jur.ku.dk to receive a Zoom link.