Asylum Protection News 9

Refugees Fleeing Religious Persecution Treated Unfairly

Human Rights First survey finds inappropriate quizzing
of religious refugees

Human Rights First released the results of a survey of asylum seekers and their attorneys showing that those who flee from religious persecution regularly face inappropriate “questioning” or “quizzing” about their religions from asylum adjudicators in the U.S. and elsewhere. These practices unfairly target victims of religious persecution who are not highly educated or who have lived in repressive countries where religious education is simply not available. The survey also revealed that adjudicators sometimes base their decisions on their own personal knowledge and on mistaken understandings of the refugee’s religion.

For example, the survey includes the following reports:

A Tibetan Buddhist’s claim for asylum was challenged because he could not identify “the three main books” – a concept that was relevant to Buddhism as practiced elsewhere but not to Tibetan Buddhism.

An asylum seeker from Russia who had converted to Evangelical Christianity was accused by an immigration judge of not knowing the tenets of his religion because he did not know the name, used in the English language, of “The Lord’s Prayer.” After the asylum seeker explained that he had always known the prayer as the “Our Father,” the judge reportedly began screaming and jumped out of his chair in reaction to the asylum seeker’s “lack of knowledge” of the tenets of his religion.

Asylum was initially denied to a Jewish asylum seeker from the former Soviet Union because he could not describe certain motions that were described in the adjudicator’s own copy of a U.S. publication on Judaism. The man’s ability to observe Jewish rituals had been minimal because of the historical repression of his religion and the fear he had lived in.

“The use of ‘checklists’ or ‘quizzes’ is disturbing and inappropriate,” said Eleanor Acer, Director of the Asylum Program at Human Rights First. “This is particularly troubling in the U.S., a country founded and built by religious refugees.”

Also troubling were cases in which adjudicators accused asylum seekers of religious insincerity. For instance, in one case, a Somali asylum seeker who was Muslim was found to not be credible in part because, when he fled his home which was under attack, he could not stop to bury his murdered family members without risking his own life. In another case, an asylum seeker was told that he was not a “good Christian” because he was not willing to die for his beliefs.

Survey findings revealed the following inappropriate practices among U.S. immigration adjudicators:

Quizzing and looking for the “correct” answer.

• Requests for demonstrations of faith (reciting prayer or performing practices or movements).
• Application of the adjudicator’s own (often inaccurate) knowledge of religion;
• Failure to take into account effects of repression of religion;
• Lack of consideration of inability to practice faith freely if returned;
• Accusing asylum seekers of not living up to tenets of their faith;

1. legal standards,
2. the manner of questioning,
3. the need for additional training and resources on religions and religious issues, and
4. religious, cultural and gender sensitivity.

Finally, the use of “checklists” and quizzing must be abandoned. More appropriate approaches, based on narrative questioning, should be developed.

The survey was prepared by Human Rights First in order to provide input to the Roundtable on Religion Persecution Claims, an expert roundtable co-sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Church Word Service, in Baltimore, Maryland in late October 2002.