ABSTRACT
The potential risks to asylum applicants are so serious, including risk to life itself, that asylum claims should, as we saw (§6.1), receive ‘most anxious scrutiny’ – a phrase brandished talismanically at some point in virtually every appeal hearing. According to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), there are three stages involved in scrutinising and deciding asylum appeals: determining the credibility of the evidence;1 weighing that evidence to assess its probative value; and, on that basis, determining whether the burden of proof has been met (IRB 1999b: ¶4.1). The next three chapters address these processes, and although it is not possible to separate them completely in practice, the distinctions are at least heuristically useful. The focus is on expert evidence, but this must be set into the context of the treatment of evidence generally, especially that from applicants themselves.
