As part of the CREDO project, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) published the second volume of its multidisciplinary training manual on the assessment of credibility in asylum procedures. This second volume focuses on multilingual contexts, gender-related challenges of credibility assessment and credibility assessment with children.
“Credibility assessment is one of the most challenging aspects of asylum decision-making. The majority of asylum claims are rejected based on the justification that the determining authority or court does not believe what the applicant says. A number of research initiatives showed that this decision is often made in an intuitive, non-structured manner, disregarding both the relevant procedural safeguards and the vast amount of scientific knowledge about human memory, the impact of trauma, intercultural, linguistic and gender differences, and other distortion factors. To fill this gap, the HHC’s groundbreaking training manual on credibility assessment (published in 2013) offered an innovative, multidisciplinary learning method, elaborated in close cooperation with internationally renowned experts and the UNHCR. Since then, several hundreds of asylum professionals have been trained with the help of this manual all around the EU, and at as diverse places as Armenia, Kenya or Mexico.
The second volume, now available online, offers hands-on training on the linguistic and gender-related challenges of credibility assessment, as well as a specific focus on credibility assessment with children and in asylum cases based on sexual orientation or gender identity.” (HHC, 4 May 2015)
This study has been prepared in the framework of the “Building Credibility – Supporting EU-wide access to know-how on objective credibility assessment” project, led by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. Project partners were the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) and Asylum Aid (UK). The project was co-funded by the European Union (under the European Refugee Fund Community Actions). This manual has been drafted in close cooperation with the UNHCR.
Volume I of this manual: https://www.ecoi.net/en/blog/the-hungarian-helsinki-committee-publishes-a-training-manual-on-credibility-assessment-in-asylum-procedures