Detained clients and the interview record

This autumn I completed UNHCR’s Fundamentals of Immigration Detention course. Its core principle is familiar to practitioners: under international standards, immigration detention should be the exception, and even lawful detention can become arbitrary if it is unnecessary or disproportionate.

This note is about something narrower — what detention does to the language in the record.

Why detention changes the account

Fear, exhaustion, trauma and uncertainty all affect how an account comes out. Interviews and legal visits from detention are often by telephone or video link, with fewer visual cues, weaker audio and less time. Hesitations, self-corrections and qualifiers — “I think”, “maybe”, “I was told” — are exactly the words that get lost first.

Vulnerability is often in the wording

The course covers survivors of torture, children, LGBTI asylum-seekers, older people and people with disabilities. The first signs of vulnerability are often in the words a client chooses: an indirect reference, a euphemism, a phrase that only makes sense in the client’s own variety of Arabic. If those are smoothed into neutral English, the signal is gone.

Six things to check in a detained client’s interview record

1. How was the interview conducted — in person, by video or by telephone — and how long did it run without a break?
2. Was the client asked whether they understood the interpreter, and was any difficulty noted?
3. Does the client’s variety of Arabic match the interpreter’s? A Yemeni or Sudanese speaker interviewed through a different variety may follow the questions and still lose detail in the answers.
4. Where the record shows a contradiction, is it in a passage the client described as uncertain, approximate or second-hand?
5. Are dates recorded as precise Gregorian dates where the client is likely to have used a Hijri, seasonal or approximate reference? (See When a “contradictory” date isn’t a contradiction.)
6. Is there an audio recording? If so, the English can be checked against the Arabic.

None of these is a finding. They are the questions to ask before an inconsistency is treated as a credibility point.

This briefing is general information about language and interpreting. It is not legal advice.