This mixed-methods study analyses a sample of 303 rejections of refugee claims by Canadian refugee status adjudicators. It explores the role that inferences about the claimant’s risk response play in supporting the adjudicators’ conclusions that the claimant is lying. In justifying their negative credibility conclusions, the adjudicators in almost two out of three decisions (63%) cited the claimant’s risk response. They often measured the claimant against a general idealized standard: in the face of an alleged danger, the claimant did not act like a ‘person at risk’. This approach brings to refugee law the confusion that characterizes the common law’s most famous fiction. Like the ‘reasonable man’, the ‘person at risk’ blurs the lines between descriptive analyses aimed at understanding how a person would have acted and normative analyses aimed at establishing how a person should have acted. Moreover, in deciding how a ‘person at risk’ would act, the adjudicators did not consider social scientific sources. For many decades, researchers have investigated how human beings respond to potentially deadly threats such as natural hazards, lethal illnesses, attacks, and assaults. The adjudicators’ reasoning, resting on common sense alone, often ran counter to key insights that emerge from this body of research. This study’s findings suggest that refugee systems must guard against the use of normative standards in drawing credibility inferences from a claimant’s risk response, and that they must do more to ensure that social scientific evidence informs these judgments. Evidence about human risk response should be on the record in every refugee hearing.

中文翻译：

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风险与合理难民：探索加拿大难民身份拒绝的关键可信度推论

这项混合方法研究分析了加拿大难民身份裁决员拒绝难民申请的 303 项样本。它探讨了关于索赔人风险反应的推论在支持裁决者关于索赔人撒谎的结论中所发挥的作用。在证明其负面可信度结论的合理性时，裁决者在几乎三分之二的裁决中（63%）引用了索赔人的风险应对措施。他们经常根据一般理想化标准来衡量索赔人：面对所谓的危险，索赔人的行为不像“处于危险中的人”。这种做法给难民法带来了普通法最著名的虚构特征的混乱。就像“理性的人”一样，“处于危险中的人”模糊了旨在了解一个人会如何行动的描述性分析和旨在确定一个人应该如何行动的规范性分析之间的界限。此外，在决定“处于危险中的人”将如何行动时，裁决者没有考虑社会科学来源。几十年来，研究人员一直在研究人类如何应对自然灾害、致命疾病、袭击和袭击等潜在致命威胁。裁决者的推理仅基于常识，常常与该研究机构得出的关键见解相悖。这项研究的结果表明，难民系统必须防止使用规范标准从申请人的风险应对中得出可信度推论，他们必须采取更多措施确保社会科学证据为这些判断提供依据。每次难民听证会都应记录有关人类风险应对措施的证据。