ABSTRACT
Considering its high political profile and the intense public and media concern, remarkably little empirical research has been carried out on asylum processes in the UK. There are innumerable books and articles written by lawyers for lawyers, dealing with legislation (Harvey 2000; Phelan 2001), procedures and guidelines (Henderson 1997, 2003; Berkowitz and Jarvis 2000; Billings 2000; Deans 2000), or case law (Jackson 1999; Symes 2001; Symes and Jorro 2003), but this corpus is based upon legislation and written judgments rather than field observation, and there has been almost no research using critical or deconstructionist methods external to law itself. A number of books set such matters into broader context by dealing with the recent political and legal history of asylum in the UK and Europe (Schuster 2003; Gibney 2004), welfare support (Billings 2002; Robinson et al. 2003), human rights (Blake and Husain 2003), or wider policy issues (Pirouet 2001; Stevens 2004). There have also been studies of the treatment of particular categories of asylum applicants, such as women (Spijkerboer 2000; Crawley 2001; see §4.3) and homosexuals (McGhee 2001); or of particular ethnic or national groups such as Czech Roma (O’Nions 1999), Sikhs (Medical Foundation 1999a), Turkish Kurds (Medical Foundation 1999b), or Tamils (Medical Foundation 2000; Good 2003a).
