Credibility Assessment in Claims based on Persecution for Reasons of Religious Conversion and Homosexuality: A Practitioners Approach
Uwe Berlit, Harald Doerig, Hugo Storey · International Journal of Refugee Law · 2015
In June 2015 the European Chapter of the International Association of Refugee Law Judges (IARLJ) convened a workshop on credibility assessment in claims based on persecution for reasons of religious conversion and homosexuality. Prompting this choice of subject were recent judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) which define requirements for the recognition as a refugee of asylum seekers who base their claims on persecution of that type.1 Forty Judges from thirteen EU member states had collected and made available to the workshop their most important national judgments and - if available - the national questionnaires used as the basis of the applicant’s interview by the government authorities. The judges’ development of criteria for the assessment of the credibility of asylum seekers will be summarized in the following. The article starts with an overview of the legal framework for the assessment of asylum claims in general, as set out in article 4 EU Directive 2011/95/EU - the so-called (Recast) Qualification Directive (QD). It then elaborates specific criteria for the assessment of claims based on religion and homosexuality.