Saturday, April 16, 2016
Minuet (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Recent studies on asylum law have offered strong critiques of the discursive power technologies and judicial practices through which refugee’s narratives are scrutinized for their credibility and cultural intelligibility. Asylum hearings have been named one of the most complex adjudication processes in our current times, as they are completely entangled with the political imperatives to contain South-North migrations along routes of precarious existence and human suffering. In the context of the current refugee crisis, the role of the asylum court has once more come under close scrutiny. I want to focus on one easily overlooked issue of resilience in this context, which is linked to the assessment of ‘religious persecution’ as lending intelligibility to the refugee claims by members of the Ahmadiyya minority since the early 1980s. Drawing on ethnographic research in German courts and diasporic communities in the Frankfurt region over a period of ten years, I will problematize the controversial relationship between assessments of ‘religious character’ in court rulings and courtroom interviewing. I argue that the evolving contradictions between legal theories and lived religion have had profound consequences for those in positions of migrant marginalities –therefore my focus on ‘radiating effects.’ My study of the Ahmadiyya case carves out the specific local contexts in which different players negotiate religious identity in the field of judicial power. Beyond its local specificities I also offer a lens on the transnational dimension of legal theories (of religion) and their implementation through bodies such as the European High Court for Human Rights.
