The Belgian asylum procedure

The Belgian asylum procedure is an interview-based procedure in which the applicants have to explain their motivation for seeking asylum in Belgium. At the time of the data collection,Footnote ¹ the following three government authorities were responsible for the determination of refugee status:

• • The Dienst Vreemdelingenzaken or DVZ (Immigration Department) falls under the Ministry of the Interior and is responsible for the admissibility examination.

• • The Commissariaat Generaal voor de Vluchtelingen en de Staatlozen or CGVS (General Commissioner's Office for Refugees and Stateless Persons) is an independent authority that examines appeals against a DVZ decision of refusal and that is responsible for the assessment of eligibility for protection.

• • The Vaste Beroepscommissie voor Vluchtelingen or VBV (Permanent Commission of Appeal for Refugees) is a judiciary body that examines appeals against negative CGVS decisions.

The asylum seeker's main contribution to the application procedure consists of submitting personal documents, telling one's narrative of escape, and explaining one's motivation for applying for asylum in Belgium. It is the task of the asylum authorities to determine whether or not, on the basis of the related narrative, applicants produce a credible account and fulfill the required criteria of refugee status.

The Belgian Assize Court

The Assize Court is the highest criminal court in Belgium that deals with the most serious offenses such as murder and rape. It is composed of three professional judges and twelve citizens who act as jurors. The public prosecution, represented by an attorney general or his deputy, has to defend the general interests of society and is there to ensure the application of law. The counsel is entitled to represent the interests of the defendant(s) before the court. The civil parties are the victims or the plaintiffs who claim damage for the crime committed by the defendant(s). The Assize court has no permanent structure but sits on an ad hoc basis in the first instance court of each provincial capital.

Although Belgium has a civil law tradition, its legal system has been described as “mixed” because it contains both inquisitorial and adversarial features (Traest Reference Traest2001). The inquisitorial nature of the proceedings is reflected in the active role of the presiding judge who has a discretionary power to do everything s/he judges necessary to discover the truth, as well as in the heavy reliance on the pretrial case file. The adversarial dimension is mirrored in the fact that the different parties are entitled to summon witnesses and present their evidence (principle of orality), however, on condition that the inquisitorial protocol is observed according to which they can only indirectly address a witness through the presiding judge.

The Assize Court procedure is the only procedure in Belgium in which the evidence has to be orally (re)presented in front of a jury: all actors in the pretrial investigation become witnesses on trial. The jury's evaluation should be based on the oral testimonies—not on the case file—and they are instructed to form their opinion solely according to their innermost conviction. Nevertheless, as the data demonstrates, textuality keeps pervading the oral proceedings in the ways quotations from the written case file are mobilized, shaped, and appropriated as they travel through the legal process.

Notwithstanding the fact that criminal law procedures and asylum application procedures could be considered complete opposites from an intrinsic legal perspective, procedural decision-making is in both cases premised on discursive (re)constructions of what counts as evidence in the institutional space. What follows next is an attempt at reconstructing a particularly complex trajectory of textual (re)production. Analysis demonstrates how one single document, which is, in itself, the textual residue of laminated processes of discursive filtering, generates a new chain of discursive representations and identity attributions as it travels within and across procedures.

The discursive history of the text in the Belgian Asylum Procedure

Research on the use of language in the determination of refugee status has shown that discourses produced by and on behalf of asylum seekers undergo several layers of filtering, a process that inevitably affects the decision-making process (Barsky Reference Barsky1994; Pöllabauer Reference Pöllabauer2004; Maryns Reference Maryns2006; Tipton Reference Tipton2008; Blommaert Reference Blommaert2009; Jacquemet Reference Jacquemet2009, Reference Jacquemet2011). Similarly, the pivotal text in the analyzed case—the ID decision of refusal—can be considered a residue of intricate processes of bureaucratic information management. What follows is an attempt at reconstructing the discursive processes this document has gone through in the course of the asylum procedure from the moment it was issued, all the way back to the initial stages of information gathering.

To start with the textual residue—the end product of the textual process—the ID decision of refusal is a document that has been written by an assistant-adviser of the Immigration Department.

1. (1) Fragment uit de DVZ beslissing tot weigering van verblijf (markering toegevoegd) Extract from the ID decision of refusal (emphasis added)Footnote ²

   Betrokkene verklaart lid te zijn van de Socialistische Partij. Toen de Taliban in 1996 aan de macht kwam zouden daarenboven verschillende partijleden door de Taliban zijn opgepakt. Een van hen zou betrokkenes naam hebben vernoemd, betrokkene zou dit hebben vernomen van een ander partijlid, K. Betrokkene zou hierop naar MS zijn gevlucht (…)

   Betrokkenes verklaring is uiterst vaag en algemeen. Hij haalt zeer weinig concrete feiten en exacte data aan . Betrokkene vermeldt niet wanneer hij van voornoemd lid van de partij vernam dat een ander partijlid zijn naam aan de Taliban had gegeven zodat uit betrokkenes verklaring niet kan worden afgeleid wanneer hij naar MS vertrok. Uit zijn verklaring blijkt echter wel dat hij alle door hem aangehaalde feiten van een ander partijlid vernam en dat hij persoonlijk nooit concrete problemen kende met de Taliban, hij haalt immers geen enkel concreet feit aan waaruit zou blijken dat hij persoonlijk ondervond dat hij door de Taliban werd gezocht. Betrokkene kan dan ook geen enkel begin van bewijs voorleggen ter staving van de door hem aangehaalde feiten. De motieven die hij aanhaalt getuigen onvoldoende van een gegronde vrees voor een persoonlijke vervolging in de zin van de Conventie van Geneve . Zijn asielaanvraag is bijgevolg onontvankelijk.

   The person concerned states that he is a member of the Socialist Party. When the Taliban came into power in 1996, the Taliban allegedly arrested several party members. One of them is alleged to have mentioned the name of the person concerned, the person concerned was allegedly told by another party member, K. After this, the person concerned is alleged to have fled to MS (…)

   The declaration of the person concerned is exceedingly vague and general. He produces very few concrete facts and accurate dates. The person concerned does not mention when the afore-mentioned party member told him that another party member had given his name to the Taliban so that it cannot be inferred from the declaration of the person concerned when it was that he left for MS. From his declaration, however, it is very obvious that he heard all the reported facts from a party member and that he personally never had any concrete problems with the Taliban, after all, he presents not the slightest concrete fact that proves that he personally experienced that he was followed by the Taliban. Thus, the person concerned cannot present the slightest beginning of proof to verify the reported facts. The reported motives do not sufficiently attest to a well-founded fear of personal persecution in the terms of the Geneva Convention. Therefore, his asylum application is inadmissible.

The full ID decision of refusal displays a number of textual features that define it as a factual report with binding force:

• • Written in standard Dutch, the language of procedure in the Flemish-speaking community

• • Monologic account in the 3rd person (impersonal reference to “the person concerned”)

• • Rich in verifiable information (dates, places, names)

What also characterizes this document is that the applicant's declarations are formulated as allegations (‘the Taliban allegedly arrested several party members,’ ‘he is alleged to have fled to MS’) and that he is given an active role in providing information to the asylum agencies (‘the person concerned does not mention when …’/ ‘cannot present …’). In addition, the text echoes a set of standard formulations, which are used to explain how the applicant fails to meet the convention criteria. These passages—marked in small caps—which repeatedly recur in ID decisions of refusal (Maryns Reference Maryns2006), topicalize what is missing from the application, that is, the lack of detail and verifiable facts as well as the absence of a subjective perspective that reflects personal involvement in the reported situations. These findings then support the decision that the application does not comply with the convention criteria and that the applicant will not be granted the status of political refugee. The applicant, in other words, is judged on the absence of factual evidence that can prove his precarious condition. The question then is why the applicant failed to provide the required information in the hearing and what the conditions were under which this information was elicited, produced, and reproduced in the course of the procedure. These contexts, however, cannot be inferred from the ID decision of refusal. What is more, assistant advisers generally do not have access to these contexts either for they are themselves usually not involved in the interviewing process.Footnote ³ Their decision is based purely on the written documents and reports that have been produced in yet another phase of report writing, which precedes the decision-making process.

The key document in this preceding phase of textual production is the ID hearing report produced by the interviewing official (extract (2)). A standard questionnaire is used, which comprises a set of questions about the personality, the asylum history and the travel route of the claimant, followed by the applicant's narrative of escape, which is, just like the eventual decision of refusal, rendered as a first person account in Dutch, monologic (i.e. leaving out the question-and-answer structure), chronologically organized and containing factual information (names, dates, places). The next fragment from the ID hearing report displays the above-mentioned textual features.

1. (2) Fragment uit het DVZ verhoorverslag

   Fragment from the ID hearing report

   Ik heet X., geboren in Kabul op xx/xx/xxxx en gevlucht voor het Taliban regime. Toen de Taliban aan de macht kwam, moesten alle socialistische partijen die in de vorige regeringen zaten van N.N. verboden worden. Alle partijleden moesten voor de Taliban in de gevangenis belanden. De Taliban sloeg erin om een aantal mensen van mijn partij op te pakken, waaronder een zekere A. Hij verklikte alles. Hij heeft de Taliban alles gezegd over de werking van onze partij en wie de leden waren en wat we allemaal deden binnen de partij. Hij heeft ook mijn naam genoemd. Binnen mijn partij was ik aangesteld om alle teksten en propaganda van de partij te typen en deze teksten dan door te geven aan collega's partijleden en vrienden. Zo werden de teksten verspreid. Partijgenoot K. heeft onder anderen mij laten weten dat A. opgepakt was en dat hij alle informatie aan de Taliban had gegeven (waaronder ook mijn naam). Hij heeft me gezegd dat ik diende te vluchten, want ik zou zeker opgepakt worden en vervolgd worden.

   My name is X., born in Kabul on xx/xx/xxxx and fled from the Taliban regime. When the Taliban came into power, all socialist parties of the previous governments of N.N. had to be banned. For the Taliban, all party members had to end up in prison. The Taliban managed to arrest a number of people from my party, including a certain A. He revealed everything. He told the Taliban everything about the functioning of our party and who the members were and all the things we did in the party. In my party I was appointed to type all the texts and propaganda of the party and then pass on these texts to colleague party members and friends. This is how the texts were distributed. Party member K. let me, amongst others, know that A. was arrested and that he had given all the information to the Taliban (including my name). He told me that I had to escape, because I would certainly be arrested and persecuted.

What cannot be retrieved from this report, however, is how its discursive input—the interactional dynamics of the asylum hearing—has undergone multiple transformations of discursive codes, modes, and views, together with a potential effect on the meanings produced. In the asylum hearing, the interviewing official asks the asylum seeker questions about his identity and then proceeds by a series of very specific and detailed questions about his travel route and the reasons for leaving his home country. The interview is conducted in Dutch but mediated by an Afghan-Dutch interpreter. As the interviewing official writes up his hearing report, the initially produced discourses inevitably undergo several layers of filtering:

• • From a spoken to a written medium

• • From multilingual performance (interpreted interaction Afghan–Dutch) to monolingual standard Dutch

• • From a triadic mode (asylum seeker–interpreter–interviewing official) to a monoglossic mode

• • From experiential narration to a factual record of events (chronological and consistent)

• • From information elicitation (subquestions, photo elicitation techniques, document analysis) to a perspective of active contribution and information input

Asylum accounts are by definition co-constructed in dialogue (or trialogue) with the authorities but as soon as these oral accounts go on record in written reports, they are abstracted from the interdiscursive dynamics that conditioned their production. Consequently, caseworkers at a later stage in the procedure no longer have access to the actual conditions under which these accounts took shape: Did the interaction go smoothly? Did the asylum seeker know what to expect from the hearing? How about the asylum officer's preknowledge of the cultural, political, and socioeconomic situation of the applicant's home country? What exact questions and additional questions were posed? What information was explicitly asked for, what was elicited, and what was actively produced by the applicant? How about the role of the interpreter: was s/he able to adhere to the deontological requirements of accuracy, impartiality, and confidentiality?

As microanalysis of asylum hearings at the Belgian Immigration Department has demonstrated (Maryns Reference Maryns2006), asylum accounts testify to the discursive conditions under which they are (re)constructed and assessed. Encounters where the use of nonnative varieties, mixed language use and relay interpreting (with one or more intermediary languages) are the exception rather than the rule, rarely produce accounts that display the textual features characterizing official reports. Moreover, requirements of factual detail such as the request for exact orientation of experiences in time and space not uncommonly clash with the fluctuating event perspective of asylum seekers who find themselves in a processing stage of experience, all of which may demotivate applicants who can suffer retraumatization when transforming their memories into tellable experiences. A difficult interpreting process or experiential narration of traumatic events are just some of the many parameters that may color the construction of asylum accounts, yet these meaningful contexts of narrative development easily get lost in the process of being reformulated according to institutional standards of textual reproduction.

Report writing, as any type of discourse representation, inevitably involves transformation (Bucholz Reference Bucholz2000) and one could argue that as long as the applicant agrees with the kind of reformulation suggested by the official, this rendition will do as a reliable representation. Closer examination of the interactive input in the ID hearing reports (Maryns Reference Maryns2006), however, has shown that asylum hearings at this early stage of investigation generally allow very little space for contextualization, metacommunication, and negotiation of intended and inferred meanings. Moreover, applicants are often asked to sign the hearing report for approval without it being read or retranslated to them first (Maryns Reference Maryns2006). Nevertheless, even when applicants have little control over these representations, the textual residue that survives their interaction with the authorities is still attributed to them.

Consequently, given the above described precarious conditions of textual reproduction in the Belgian asylum procedure, it is most hazardous to conclude, merely on the basis of the textual residue that has survived the institutional chain of entextualizations, that the applicant was incapable of providing the required factual account, let alone unwilling to do so.

The discursive afterlife of the text in the Belgian Assize Court Procedure

The ID decision of refusal in extract (1) recurs at several stages in the assize trial. It is part of the character report (lit. morality report) of the victim, which comprises information gathered by the examining magistrate in the course of the pretrial investigation about the victim's personality. This report includes, besides a record of the testimonies of relatives and acquaintances, an account of the migration history of the man. A chief inspector of the police, appointed to assist the examining magistrate, is now summoned as an expert witness in the trial to report on the victim's migration file. The police inspector sets out this decision in great detail. Although the criminal code prescribes this report to be an objective account of the data obtained, it is striking that he takes an active stance in highlighting the negative outcome of the application.

As soon as the presiding judge opens the floor for questions, the defence counsel for his part eagerly continues with an evaluation of the victim's character, further topicalizing the negative outcome of the ID decision of refusal in his argument. However, whereas the police witness refers to the ID decision only to throw a light on the victim's migration identity, the defence counsel strategically deploys this text to depict the overall personality of the man. This can be seen in (3): the defence counsel addresses the witness directly—thereby ignoring the inquisitorial protocol of indirect examination—though the presiding judge repeatedly comes in to qualify the counsel's arguments.Footnote ⁴

1. (3) Passage uit een vraag van de advocaat aan de getuige

   Passage from a question of the defence counsel for the witness

   1. 1. DEF: Eigenlijk als ik lees wat de minister schrijft =ik bedoel wat de ministeriële diensten schrijven, u hebt het misschien al gezegd, ik verontschuldig mij ervoor, maar ik vraag uit een soort interpretatie, ik bedoel dan de bijlage bij de beslissing tot weigering van verblijf en we zijn dan xx/xx/xxxx, en het zal dan, gecorroboreerd worden xx/xx/xxxx met het bevel om =het bevel om het grondgebied te verlaten =in zijn theoretische aspecten =maar als eenvoudige mens die dat leest kan ik nie anders, dan dat de overheid daar =en ik ga =over de doden niets dan goeds, zegt men maar ik wil peilen naar de persoonlijkheid van het slachtoffer, hij moet fameus gelogen hebben, want in de x termen gezegd =

   2. 2. PRESIDING JUDGE: =maar nu kan ik =nu moet ik u toch even onderbreken, deze beslissing is niet definitief =u mag zeggen wat erin staat maar maar gaan zeggen dat hij gelogen heeft

   3. 3. DEF: ik zeg dat ik denk, dat als ge leest dat de dienst schrijft “betrokkene =

   4. 4. PRESIDING JUDGE: =ja, u moet er wel bij zeggen, er is beroep tegen he =

   5. 5. DEF: =ja ja maar dat beroep, en dat die jonge man op dat ogenblik met de waarheid duchtig een loopje heeft genomen he, en dat zeg IK dan maar he als we daar =“betrokkene BETROKKENE 's verklaring, is uiterst vaag en algemeen, hij haalt zeer weinig concrete feiten en exacte data aan, betrokkene =NIET wanneer hij enzovoort =lid van die partij =van dat =zodat bij betrokkene's verklaring NIET kan worden afgeleid enzovoort =en dat hij persoonlijk NOOIT concrete problemen kende MET de Taliban, hij haalt immers geen enkel concreet feit aan, de betrokkene kan ook geen enkel BEGIN van bewijs voorleggen, de motieven =ik heb deernis met de vreemdelingen he, en ik KEN het stukje uit het evangelie, “er moet ook voor hen plaats zijn in de herberg,” maar hij is niet gekomen al wenend, ik ga daar alleen maar dat over zeggen, of ik kan geen teksten meer lezen, over de doden niets dan goed, maar peil naar zijn persoonlijkheid, maar ik kan nie anders zeggen =blut weg, dat dat DAT de deftige vertaling is van, “‘t zijn al leugens,” als ge een beetje naar de hele chronologie kijkt, POLITIEK asiel wordt aangevraagd, uitwijzingsbevel, 25 april xxxx, eigenlijk zegt het uitwijzingsbevel dat hij gelogen heeft, dat zegt het in beSCHAAFDE termen zoals een mens zich soms uit.

   1. 1. DEF: In fact when I read what the minister writes =I mean what the ministerial offices write, you may have said it before, I apologize for that, but I ask out of a sort of interpretation, what I mean is the annex to the decision of refusal and we are then xx/xx/xxxx, and it will then be, corroborated xx/xx/xxxx with the warrant to =the warrant to leave the territory =in its theoretical aspects =but as a humble (simple) person who reads this I cannot =but that the government there =and I'm going to =never speak ill of the dead, people say but I want to gauge the personality of the victim, he must have lied fabulously, because in the x words of =

   2. 2. PRESIDING JUDGE: =but now I can =now I really have to interrupt you for a moment, this decision is not peremptory =you may say what's in there but but (getting to the stage of) saying that he has lied

   3. 3. DEF: I say that I think, that when you ((informal)) read that the office writes “person concerned =

   4. 4. PRESIDING JUDGE: =yes, you should also say, there is an appeal against it right =

   5. 5. DEF: =yes yes but that appeal, and that this young man at that moment really slanted the truth hen, and that is just what I say hen if we =“person concerned the DECLARATION of the person concerned, is exceedingly vague and general, he produces very few specific facts and accurate dates, person concerned =NOT when he etcetera =member of that party =of that =so that from the declaration of the person concerned it CANNOT be inferred etcetera =and that he personally NEVER had actual (concrete) problems WITH the Taliban, as he produces not one single concrete fact, the person concerned also cannot present the slightest BEGINNING of proof, the motives =I pity the migrants (strangers) hen, and I do know that part from the gospel, “there should also be room for them in the hostel,” but he didn't come weeping with grief, I will just say this about it, or I am no longer able to read (texts), never speak ill of the dead, but gauge his personality, all I can say =bluntly, that that THIS is the formal (dignified) translation of, “it's all lies,” if you just consider the entire chronology, POLITICAL asylum is applied for, deportation order, April 25 xxxx, in fact it is the deportation order that says that he has lied, that's what it says in CIVILIZED terms as one sometimes expresses oneself.

The defence counsel skillfully colonizes the voice of the Immigration Department to sketch a particular identity for the victim in the assize trial. By means of a well-mastered set of interdiscursive techniques, he smoothly switches between speaker roles and this enables him to manage shifts in interactional footing between authoritative judicial voices and common sense lay perspectives (Goffman Reference Goffman1981). The actual quotation from the ID decision of refusal suggests a faithful representation of this ministerial decision: it clearly echoes the institutional voice, reflected in the use of difficult terminology (‘corroborated’), standard formulae (‘the warrant to leave the country’) and emphasis on factuality (‘April 25’). However, by means of metalinguistic signalling devices (prosody, increased pitch, selective reading) the defence counsel succeeds in highlighting those elements from the original that he wants stressed, that is, anything the applicant failed or even neglected to say, to do, or to submit. In his lay interpretation of the ID decision, he even twists the inadmissibility argument—the argument of the ID that the asylum seeker's account did not sufficiently attest to a well-founded fear of personal persecution—into an explicit case of deception, an argument that cannot be traced in the original report (cf. extract (1)). This is a highly debatable point, for it is one thing to state that on the basis of the allegations in the asylum report the man did not meet the convention criteria; it is quite another to claim that his declarations were deceptive.

The clash between the credibility attached to the institutional record of the case on the one hand and the overall uncertainty attached to the client's input in this institutional version on the other is meaningful here. In the defence argument, the firm institutional stance is underlined by the use of assertive reporting verbs (‘said,’ ‘stated’), while the reported allegations (‘allegedly,’ ‘is alleged to’) index the unsteadiness attributed to the client. Even though the reported realities are repeatedly questioned, the reporting of these realities is not. And although the judge raises questions as to the transferability of such a document, the document is in itself treated as a staunchly neutral, objective, and factual piece of discourse. At no point in their account do the courtroom participants question the conditions under which the input in this document was collected, processed, and evaluated. The defence counsel's seemingly verbatim animation from the ID decision may strongly convey legal authority, the perspective he adopts to interpret these reported utterances, however, is markedly nonprofessional: he dissociates himself from his institutional role as a legal practitioner and substitutes his legal expert stance for an everyday lay interpretation of the reported words. This dual stance not only enables him to align himself with the lay jury, it also offers him the opportunity to add legal-institutional value to his subjective interpretations without necessarily taking the responsibility (authorship) for these subjectivities.

The way in which the ID decision of refusal is used by the defence counsel as “factual evidence” to demonstrate the victim's “deceitful” behavior, can be aligned with his overall defence strategy. Throughout the trial, refugee status is strategically employed by the defence counsel to produce a particular identity for the protagonists in the case. This process of identity building is conceived as a matter of positioning in contrasts: whereas the defendant is represented as a sincere hard-working political refugee,Footnote ⁵ the victim is depicted as a deceitful economic refugee and a profiteer. This conception ties in with the negative image of the asylum seeker that is spread and reproduced in the media where asylum and migration are often bracketed together with issues of abuse and illegality. But there is more. The counsel's observation that the victim is a cheat is used as evidence to arrive at the argument of provocation. There is very little factual evidence in this case, though, to enter a plea for provocation, apart from the vague declaration of an eye witness who possibly heard the victim say something before he got shot.Footnote ⁶ Despite the disputability of this testimony, the defence counsel topicalizes the eloquence of the victim as a central element in his provocation plea.

This brings us to another remarkable instance of textual travel, this time within the assize procedure. In his character report of the victim, the examining magistrate gives an account of the statements taken from relatives and acquaintances about the social behavior of the victim. In this report he states that:

In the build-up to his provocation argument, however, the defence counsel decontextualizes these words, adding a pejorative connotation to this reported “eloquence” by reframing it as glibness used to mislead or deceive. What was initially produced as evidence for the prosecution (à charge) is now picked up from the case file and strategically reshaped into evidence for the defence (à decharge), shown in (4).

1. (4) Passage uit het pleidooi van de verdediging

   Passage from the defence plea

   DEF: Ik zeg het, over de doden niets dan goed, maar als ik die slotscene zie, de scene waarop hij (beschuldigde) losbarst en waarop hij de zo verkeerde daad stelt van het wapen uit den auto te nemen en te schieten, de scene waarin hij zich schuldig maakt =als hij dat doet, staat hij tegenover iemand (slachtoffer), die ook geen onbeschreven blad is he, en die een typische =al wie het =zeer welbespraakt zegt men, zeer welbespraakt, ook dat speelt een rol in de feiten.

   DEF: As I say, never speak ill of the dead, but when I see that final scene, the scene in which he (the defendant) collapses and in which he performs that very wrong act of taking the weapon out of the car and of shooting, the scene in which he is guilty of =when he does that, he stands in front of somebody (the victim), who is not innocent either hen, and who has a characteristic =all those who =very eloquent, this ALSO plays a role in the facts.

Given that the civil parties do not appear in the trial to testify and that the jurors have to form their opinion about the case without thorough inspection of the case file,Footnote ⁷ the defence counsel can, largely unnoticed, allow himself this metadiscursive latitude in reframing the words of others. And this is where he skillfully brings together these two stretches of entextualized discourse: through everyday forms of reasoning, he can be seen to associate the victim's alleged verbal competence to deceive the asylum authorities with the likelihood of him using verbal assault provoking physical aggression. In this way, reported speech from the asylum and assize files is strategically deployed by the defence counsel and carried further to bolster the judicial statement of provocation. The defence counsel reverses offender-victim roles here: the deceased, who does not even have an attorney or civil parties to defend his position in court, is depicted as the deceitful and insolent man, inclined to provoke aggression, while the defendant is portrayed as a model migrant who was provoked to lose self-control. These are very strong accusations. However, analysis demonstrates that the gravity of these accusations is out of all proportion to the evidence adduced by the defence to substantiate these charges. Both internal and external evidence is twisted and manipulated as it travels within and across procedural contexts. It goes without saying that when an account is persistently remolded, even across spaces of institutional decision-making, it can no longer be treated as relevant and reliable evidence in court, and it is self-evident that the procedural outcome of one specific case cannot be transposed to a different procedural setting just like that, let alone be taken as indicative of the overall identity of the person concerned. Still, it could be seen throughout the proceedings that referential transparency of the observed replications was nevertheless assumed.