Expert Witnessing in Honduran Asylum Cases:What Difference Can Twenty Years Make?

Abstract

Expert witnessing in asylum cases involves depicting the conditions of the applicant’s home country as a context for judging a well-founded fear for life or safety. Most of the elements involved in the work of the expert country witness are dynamic and change over time, creating new challenges and new resources for describing and interpreting country context. Examining several characteristic Honduran asylum cases separated by 20 years reveals not only an increasingly complex and multifaceted set of relevant conditions in both the sending and the host country, but also a significant broadening of the anthropological “tool kit” available to the expert country witness (as the expert witness becomes aware of its relevance to country conditions at a particular time), and an increasingly reflexive and complex relationship of the expert witness to the country in question and to the court. In the interim, emerging problems of contextual complexity, subjectivity, changing and competing images of reality, and the shifting applicability of legal and sociological definitions and categories arise and can be partially addressed with emerging anthropological or social scientific resources, raising anew the nature of the relationship of the expert witness to the court and the possible mutual influence of social science and legal culture upon each other over time. As the number of refugee seekers increases globally, can expert witnesses trained in social sciences help asylum courts to imagine new ways of bridging the gap between legal regimes of governmentality and the subjectivity of refugees?

Citation

Phillips, J. (2018), "Expert Witnessing in Honduran Asylum Cases:What Difference Can Twenty Years Make?", Sarat, A. and Rodriguez, L. (Ed.) Special Issue: Cultural Expert Witnessing (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 74), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 11-48. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-433720180000074003