ABSTRACT
Much of the fieldwork for this book was conducted following a marked upturn in asylum applications to European countries in 2015 and 2016, which was accompanied by moral panic about Europe’s capacity to host refugees. The political context meant that governments and policymakers were keen to reduce their expenditure on the asylum system, including refugee-status determination procedures. This chapter reviews the various consequent policy changes in our case countries that were designed to streamline asylum appeal processes. It then examines the way speediness affects hearings, arguing that key characteristics of appeals – from the interaction within them, to the way they begin and end – were impoverished by haste.
