ABSTRACT
The asylum process in the United Kingdom may not appear, at first glance, to be an obvious site of linguistic conflict; after all, asylum exists to provide protection to people fleeing from political and religious violence. A national obligation to protect refugees has been a feature of the UK’s democratic history since the signing of the 1967 UN Convention (UNHCR, 2011). Nevertheless, the process by which an asylum seeker is granted or refused refugee status is not without conflict and is designed to keep some people from attaining refugee status. Upon arrival in the UK, many who have already experienced animosity encounter a new form as they become entangled in the complex web of the institutional decision-making process. As a successful outcome depends upon the credibility of their story as evidence (Herlihy et al., 2010), the root of conflicts between the UK Home Office and asylum-seeking applicants is often linguistic. From the ways in which questions are asked and responses are recorded, to the use of inadequate translators, the asylum process requires an awareness of institutional expectations that is not attainable for most applicants. As 35.6 percent of “known” appeal outcomes were successful in 2014, 1 and 38.2 percent in 2015, the government statistics suggest that the margin of error in initial asylum decisions is considerable, and the problem does not appear to be improving over time (Hawkins, 2017, p.9). Recently released statistics show that the process cannot keep abreast of appeal outcomes, as 70 percent of those listed for 2015 were “unknown”, meaning that only 30 percent of appeals lodged had received decisions. Thus, the rate of success could be much higher than it currently is, preventing unnecessary appeals processes for institutions and protracted waiting times for applicants.
