ECRE member Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) has published a training manual on ‘Credibility Assessment in Asylum Procedures’ designed to meet the needs of asylum decision-makers and other asylum professionals. The manual aims at offering a creative and multidisciplinary learning method on credibility assessment.

Credibility assessment is considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of asylum-decision making. According to HHC, in the EU a significant proportion of asylum claims are rejected on credibility grounds, since the determining authority or court does not believe what the applicant says. However, to date there is no common definition of ‘credibility’ in an asylum context and EU law has only set basic principles in this respect.

HHC’s manual not only outlines standards and guiding principles for credibility assessment, based on requirements on EU law and UNHCR guidance, but also gives an overview of the numerous factors that may distort or impact on the use of credibility indicators in practice.

The manual has been written by international experts in the framework of the CREDO project (funded by the European Commission), in cooperation with the UNHCR. This project, coordinated by HHC, aims at improving credibility assessment in EU asylum systems, striving to make the process more structured, objective and protection-oriented.


 

 


This article originally appeared in the ECRE Weekly Bulletin of 18 October 2013
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