Socio-Legal Discussion Group: Beyond Bias: Implicit Normativity and the Imperatives of Asylum Practice

In an era marked by the global rise of the far right, the individual right to asylum – codified in international law under the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention – is under increasing attack. While we witness the dismantling of formal protection regimes across many countries, we often overlook that within intact asylum systems, adherence to legal doctrine and procedure does not inherently ensure protection for asylum seekers in need. Central to most asylum procedures is evaluating the credibility of an applicant’s narrative, a task that leaves considerable discretion to decision-makers on the ground. This study examines how such credibility assessments are conducted in legal practice, focusing on asylum claims based on religious conversion from Islam to Christianity. Drawing on court ethnography, analysis of written judgments, and interviews with asylum judges in Germany, the study demonstrates how decision-makers navigate legal norms, institutional logics, experience-based knowledge, and cultural assumptions to form conviction under conditions of radical uncertainty. Unlike much previous research, which has viewed implicit normativity in asylum decision-making solely as a form of bias that can and should be removed, this study highlights its indispensable function in enabling what are identified as the two core imperatives of asylum practice: constructing decidability in individual cases, while at the same time safeguarding the legal system’s sovereign authority to make distinctions. By adopting this functional perspective, the analysis sheds light on the ways in which these different imperatives shape the professional habitus of decision-makers and the subtle forms of migration control that arise from them.