Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and Consequences of Legal Quickening
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12220 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Nick Gill,Jessica Hambly |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 47, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2020
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 3–28
Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and
Consequences of Legal Quickening
Jessica Hambly∗and Nick Gill∗∗
This article examines how a politics of speed is manifest in a legal
context via a detailed ethnography of the French National Court of
Asylum (CNDA). It identifies the temporal, spatial, and organizational
ordering techniques that characterize asylum appeals in France and
discusses the consequences of these techniques for the way in which the
appeal process is experienced by legal decision makers and subjects.
It reveals adverse impacts of legal quickening on legal quality, in
particular through identifying: ‘cracks’in the performance of legal roles
like lawyer and judge that begin to appear when law is executed rapidly
and repetitively; dwindling opportunities to demonstrateand experience
respect between parties; and the ‘thinning-out’ of legal process, as
heuristics rather than deliberation come to dominate legal reasoning.
The article contributes to a burgeoning body of socio-legal literature
on law and time by establishing the negative impact of excessive legal
quickening on role performance, respect, and legal quality.
INTRODUCTION
One freezing February morning on Rue Cuvier in the Parisian suburb of
Montreuil, abandoned placards replace the long queue of people who would
normally be waiting to enter the French National Court of Asylum. Posters
flap about in the icy wind, bearing slogans such as ‘Dossiers partout; justice
nulle part’ (‘Cases everywhere; justice nowhere’) and ‘L’asile, pas l’usine’
(‘Asylum, not a factory’). Inside the court, the waiting rooms, usually bustling
∗College of Law, AustralianNational University, 5 Fellows Road, Acton, ACT
2600, Australia
jessica.hambly@anu.edu.au
∗∗ College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Amory
Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4RJ, England
N.M.Gill@exeter.ac.uk
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the European Research Council for
funding this research, grant number: StG-2015_677917.
3
This is an open access article under the terms of the CreativeCommonsAttribution-NonCommercial License, which permits
use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial
purposes.
© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University(CU).
with appellants, children, supporters, and lawyers, are empty and silent.
Along the corridors, the 19 hearing rooms remain closed, with ‘RENVOIE’
(‘ADJOURNED’) scrawled or stamped across the listings sheet on the wall.
Messages from the striking lawyers and court staff are taped to the walls,
denouncing ‘a jurisdiction governed by politics of numbers and speed’. The
court, which might usually hear over 200 asylum appeals on a single day, has
been brought to a standstill.
Throughout the passage of the 2018 French law for ‘controlled immigration,
an effective right to asylum, and successful integration’ (‘une immigration
maîtrisée, un droit d’asile effectif, et une intégration réussie’), historic strike
action by lawyers and court workers was accompanied by statements of
concern from asylum judges, sharp critique from academics, and protests
from a cross-section of civil society and human rights organizations. The
ambiguous headline of this legislation – a more effective right to asylum –
represents, it is argued, less of a concern for the effective rights of asylum
seekers than for an ever-quicker, slicker, more efficient process aimed at
deterring asylum claims and tightening up the expulsion regime. A number
of new measures aim specifically at compressing the asylum process. For
example, people now have only 90 days to file an asylum application after
entering French territory, after which their claim is placed in accelerated
procedures.1
Appeals to the French National Court of Asylum (Cour Nationale du Droit
d’Asile (CNDA)) are made non-suspensive for some cases under accelerated
procedures. For all asylum seekers, whether or not in the accelerated
procedure, their right to stay on French territory now ceases as soon as the
CNDA’s decision is read in public session – that is to say, when it is displayed
in the lobby of the court. One of the few measures abandoned at the National
Assembly in the face of strong opposition was the reduction in time limit for
filing an appeal against a negative first decision, from 30 to 15 days. However,
a 15-day limit for legal aid applications effectively enforces the shorter period.
Other measures tip the balance of power further in favour of the state – for
example, relating to choice of language, and notification of initial decisions,
which may now be ‘by any means’, including text, email, or voicemail. Given
that many asylum seekers do not have guaranteed access to phones or internet,
this may impede access to appeal rights, as the time period for lodging an
appeal in case of a negative decision starts to run from when notification was
issued. A further controversial aspect of this legislation permits the expansion
of video-link appeal hearings between the CNDA and other courts in mainland
France, even without the consent of the appellant.2
The French Parliament has adopted a new reform of the law of immigration,
asylum, or nationality on average every two or three years since the 1980s.
Reforms in 2015 aimed at streamlining and speeding up asylum procedures,
1 The existence of these procedures is itself a mark of the intense political drive to speed
up asylum processing.
2 Previously,the use of video hearings was restricted to appeals from overseas territories.
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© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University (CU).
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