Whereas the primary purpose rule is now in the past, British policy towards those applying for asylum under the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees continues to be a contentious political issue. According to Home Office statistics, an average of 7% of applicants each year were recognised as refugees between 1992 and 1997, although an average of 24% were given Exceptional Leave to Remain.

Conservative governments in Britain during the late 1980s and 1990s took the view that most people applying for asylum were, in fact, economic migrants who were using the Convention to gain access to Britain. Although ministers in Tony Blair’s New Labour government have made fewer public statements about the ‘bogus’ character of claims, policy on asylum has not appreciably changed. The numerous organisations and pressure groups representing refugees continue to argue that most claims are genuine, and that adjudicators dismiss too many appeals. Only 4% were successful during the period 1993-96, although this has increased to about 6% since 1997.

My objective in this chapter is not to advance a political argument about the way appeals are decided in the courts, although the data I will be presenting could be used by either side in this debate. Instead, I again want to focus on how practitioners understand legal and evidential issues in the course of their day-to-day work.

I will begin by providing some historical background on the Convention and the process of determining asylum claims in Britain, and present a summary of six appeals from my corpus of data. I will then discuss some general features of decision making, and consider the claim made by organisations representing refugees that their low success rate can be attributed to a ‘culture of refusal’ in the courts.

The 1951 Convention and British law

The 1951 Convention was signed by 197 countries, as one of a series of agreements, including the formation of the United Nations, that were intended to re-establish and strengthen the international community following the Second World War.

Signatories of the Convention are required to provide protection to anyone satisfying the following definition of a ‘refugee’ set out in Article 1(A):