CSEL training at ILPA with Raggi Kotak

Jane Herlihy and Raggi Kotak, of 1, Pump Court, will be providing a 3 hour CPD accredited training on Psychological Factors in Credibility Assessments of Asylum Seekers at ILPA, on Tuesday, October 29th.

See here for more details and booking.

CSEL boosting the development of Emotion & Law studies

Last week Jane went to a groundbreaking European meeting of emotion and law scholars at Queens University, Belfast, shaped by the thinking of Terry Maroney of Vanderbilt University, Kathy Abrams of University of California, Berkeley and organised by John Stannard and Heather Conway of QUB. Emotion and law studies have been developing for some years in the US, and now the growth of the field is gathering pace on this side of the Atlantic too – and we’re excited that CSEL is playing a part in this.

The meeting heard a wide variety of presentations about the intersections of law and emotion, including emotion in recourse to law (e.g. the immigrant justice movement in the US, or the settlement of wills and estate between siblings); emotion in the processes of law (e.g. the role of Judges’ anger in judicial decision making) and emotion in the outcome of legal processes (e.g. the effects of custodial remand, victims’ rights). We also had some excellent framing presentations on the history of thought about emotion and approaches to the study of emotion and law.
Now those of us involved in the meeting are looking at how we can take our work together forward, starting with exchanges of ideas and methodology from our different disciplines.

Some of the group have also contributed to a special edition of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, due out soon. We’ll post a summary and link here as soon as it’s out.
For further developments, watch this space – keep an eye on the CSEL website as we pull together resources and materials to further the study of emotion and law.

Stuart Turner hands over the baton as chair of trustees

The Centre for the Study of Emotion and Law has come of age. When Jane Herlihy and I first decided to establish an organization to investigate the psychological basis for assumptions made by judges and other decision makers about the stories they heard, it felt as if we were very much on our own. Fortunately my medico-legal practice in the Trauma Clinic meant that I could support this project financially. Soon we had gathered a group of very eminent advisers and when we were ready to establish CSEL formally, I agreed to become chair of trustees – until CSEL was ready to stand on its own. That time has now arrived.

CSEL is now an established and respected organization providing high quality primary and secondary research to support fair and just decision making, initially in the asylum field but with plans to extend its work into other areas. It is now financially independent of the Trauma Clinic and has been able to attract support from a wide range of funders. There is a great body of trustees, of all the talents, and I am delighted that David Rhys Jones has agreed to continue as acting chair for the time being. Crucially, Jane has proved to be an outstanding director. Perhaps even more important than her academic excellence is her ability to communicate effectively at so many different levels with others in the field. Jane and I plan to continue to work together, and I look forward with pleasure to active collaboration in some of the research work within CSEL, but the time has come for me to step down as trustee. I feel very much like a proud parent seeing his child off to university. I am confident in the future of CSEL and I wish it well for the future.

Stuart Turner

RLI seminars online

Last night the Refugee Law Initiative and CSEL hosted the last in our series of seminars on psychology and seeking asylum. It was well attended and we enjoyed interesting discussions - with the speakers and the audience. Now videos of the first two seminars are available online (with instructions on how to download the audio files). The rest will follow, so watch this space.

Putting Evidence into Practice

This month I started work on our new dissemination project, Evidence into Practice, funded by Comic Relief and focusing particularly on reaching legal professionals with CSEL's psychological research findings. The project will run for three years, and will have a similar structure to the Women's Research Dissemination project: as before we'll be running 2-3 training sessions each year, publishing articles in relevant journals, delivering conference presentations, and developing CSEL's overall dissemination capacity in order to reach more legal professionals than we can reach directly through our training.

Evidence into Practice will also feature some exciting new plans and ways of working:

·       We will focus more particularly on legal professionals than we have before, with a commitment to in-house training for lawyers, as well as training for legal workers (including potentially caseworkers) in the voluntary sector.

·       Our commitments also include dedicated follow-up sessions for training participants to support ongoing use of CSEL's research findings.

·       The project will develop our communications infrastructure and capacity – we'll be recruiting a communications intern later this year (watch this space!)

·       Further down the line we'll be organising a forum or roundtable event to explore the involvement of refugee women in research into refugee women's issues, looking at the ethics and practicalities of participation and involvement.

At the moment, I'm in the research phase: talking to lawyers and caseworkers about what information they need from CSEL and how to deliver it to make it most useful; finding out more about the legal services available to women seeking asylum and who's providing them; re-evaluating our existing training. Phase 2 will involve designing the project's training seminar, and planning the delivery of the project over the next 3 years. Hopefully the first training seminar will be delivered in early summer.

Are you a lawyer or caseworker working with women seeking asylum? If so, I'd love to hear from you: I'm looking for suggestions as to law firms, law centres, and regions of the UK where we can take our training, and suggestions as to essential content to include in the training – or, indeed, non-essential content we can discard from training seminars! If you'd be willing to be contacted as part of my project research and planning, please get in touch with me.

Meanwhile, don't forget you can download our current training manual with summaries of some of our research from our website.

Clare Cochrane

Evidence into Practice project manager

DON'T MISS THE LAST SEMINAR...

... in our joint seminar series with the Refugee Law Initiative!

On Tuesday evening, Feb. 26th,  Professor Chris Brewin will present  cutting edge science on psychological trauma and memory.  Dr Stuart Turner will show how this work is crucial to making high quality decisions about people seeking state protection.  Judge Catriona Jarvis will share her responses to the presentations and reflections on this approach to refugee decision making.  Click here for details and to join us.

Watch presentations from the Irish Refugee Council conference on credibility

See here for videos of presentations by Professor Guy Goodwin-Gill, Professor of International Refugee Law at All Souls College, Oxford, Professor Rosemary Byrne, Associate Professor of International and Human Rights Law and the Director of the Centre for Post-Conflict Justice at Trinity College, Dublin, Ms Fadela Novak-Irons, UNHCR Policy Officer for Europe and yours truly, of CSEL, speaking at a Conference on Credibility in International Protection Claims, excellently organised by the Irish Refugee Council, in Dublin.