Credibility in the Crosshairs: Empirically tracing discretion and bias in Danish asylum decision-making

PhD defence by Asta S. Stage Jarlner

Short description of the thesis

Determining if a person is entitled to asylum is, formally, an application of international refugee and human rights law within a national administrative setting. Yet, the question decisions often turn on is not whether the treatment a claimant fears reaches the threshold of persecution, but whether decision-makers find the claimant and their testimony credible.

This PhD thesis combines systematic qualitative analyses, experiments, natural language processing, and advanced statistics to examine how credibility assessments structurally unfold and determine who is granted protection. Drawing on thousands of decisions by the Danish Refugee Appeals Board, the research shows that ‘credibility’ is not only conceptually fuzzy but assessed inconsistently – and that these inconsistencies are neither random nor reflections of fixed preferences for some groups over others. Rather, they are highly context-dependent, shaped by the interaction of claim types and the identities of claimants and decision-makers. Collectively, the findings suggest that credibility assessments are prone to systemic bias, with implications for asylum systems' capacity to deliver the equal, fair protection international law demands.

Assessment Committee

Associate Professor Nora Stappert, MOBILE Center of Excellence, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen (Chairperson)
Associate Professor Sean Rehaag, Osgoode Law School, University of York
Professor Jan Antfolk, Åbo Akademi

Supervisors

Professor Thomas Graae Gammeltoft-Hansen
Professor Henrik Palmer Olsen

Email address to gain access to the thesis: phd-forsvar@jur.ku.dk.
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