Today we are pleased to announce a new and exciting multidisciplinary report under the auspices of the CREDO 2 project. The Heart of the Matter: Assessing Credibility when Children Apply for Asylum in the European Union, published by UNHCR, and funded by the European Commission's European Refugee Fund, brings expertise from across a range of disciplines to bear on the complex question of how the credibility of unaccompanied children and adolescents can best be assessed in the context of the EU asylum process.
CSEL's Child Psychology Researcher Zoe Given-Wilson contributed a chapter on 'The Importance of a Multidisciplinary Approach', having spent 2014 working on a rigorous and wide-ranging review of the current literature relating to child credibility assessment, both in the context of asylum proceedings, and also other legal processes such as child protection cases. Zoe looked at a variety of aspects of child psychology, such as memory, fear, trust and shame, alongside studies and papers focusing on the psychology of decision-makers, ranging from the assumptions decision-makers hold about children from other cultures, to how such decision-makers attempt to deal with the emotional impact of hearing distressing or traumatic testimonies from children.
If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, that's because it is: in 2013, UNHCR and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee deployed a similar multidisciplinary methodology for the CREDO 1 project. CREDO 1 aimed to promote best practice across the EU for credibility assessment of adults through its report, Beyond Proof: Credibility Assessment in EU Asylum Systems, a training manual, to which CSEL Director Jane Herlihy and co-founder Stuart Turner contributed a chapter on 'Memory and its Limitations', and EU-wide training for state decision-makers and asylum judges, which is still ongoing.
As the introduction to this new report makes clear:
"The Heart of the Matter aims to help decision-makers assess the credibility of children’s claims in a fair,
objective and consistent manner. It sets out a number of observations that could serve as the foundation for
guidance on the subject. It is hoped that this research will contribute towards strengthening practice in the
difficult area of child asylum claims, and towards UNHCR’s elaboration of globally applicable Guidelines
on Credibility Assessment."
We will keep you updated as CREDO 2 moves into the training and dissemination phase. In the meantime, feel free to send any comments or questions you have about CSEL's contribution to The Heart of the Matter to our Director Jane Herlihy at j.herlihy@csel.org.uk.
