I'm back home from Hungary today and reflecting on my first international meeting of 2015 with the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the UNHCR Division of International Protection and UNHCR’s Global Learning Centre, in Budapest.
Image by: Edgar Barany C
The CREDO project
documented credibility assessment and brought together best practice from all
over Europe, and CSEL contributed scientific evidence on memory and decision
making for the final report, Beyond
Proof. The second report is due out soon, with a contribution from our Zoe
Given-Wilson on the psychological factors important to making decisions about unaccompanied children. In the meantime, in the course of training sessions, meetings and discussions
over the years, it has become increasingly clear that the multidisciplinary
approach and the methodology which UNHCR, through Beyond Proof, is proposing,
are applicable beyond the bounds of Europe.
So the
meeting in Budapest this week brought some of the most experienced and
most thoughtful minds in the business of asylum decision making, from judges to
academics to those responsible for training state decision makers. They came from across Europe, but also from
Canada and New Zealand, together with those in UNHCR whose remit is global, to share
experience, evidence and research literature on some of the more complicated and nuanced issues in credibility assessment.
It was a fascinating
two days and a privilege to be in such company, and to see such breadth to the potential contribution that empirical scientific evidence can make to decisions about protection. Look out for the next CREDO report, and volume 2 of the accompanying training manual. We'll publish links here as soon as we have
them.
