In this paper we identify epistemic injustices that occur within the asylum system when asylum speakers provide accounts that involve errors. In standard cases of testimonial injustice, as described by Fricker (2007), a speaker articulates knowledge but the response by a hearer to this knowledge is disbelief. In the cases we describe, asylum seekers provide accounts that include untruths, either due to memory errors, sometimes caused by trauma, or due to the incentives within the asylum system to lie, and it is in response to these untruths that their claims to asylum are met with disbelief by asylum decision makers. We argue that although in such cases the asylum decision maker has some evidence to support their disbelief, there is nonetheless an epistemic injustice, which we call an untruth-involving-credibility-deficit. The epistemic injustice can have its source in the cognitive biases or epistemic irresponsibility of the asylum decision-maker, the epistemic irresponsibility of those who design asylum policies and procedures, or the asylum system itself. We focus in on how pressures within the asylum system, those that increase memory errors and produce incentives to lie, are implicated in the epistemic injustices by leading asylum seekers to provide inaccurate testimony. We argue that observations about how the system causes false testimony to be provided calls for recognition of a class of cases of epistemic injustice we call upstream structural epistemic injustices.  

 

Wednesday 13 October 2021, 3pm via MS Teams.