(b)
One
notes more difficult; and I imagine it would exasperate interpreters, at least if accounts I have heard are correct. result is that the immigration officer's task has been made more difficult than it could have been, or ever needs to be. Another is that the asylum-seeker may be misunderstood, or his or her account recorded unreliably. I should add that I have heard allegations concerning the competence of interpreters.
The cure is a combined process of pre-screening counselling and information-gathering, and a transfer of data from this stage in approved form to the Immigration Service, so the immigration officer can prepare for a restructured form of interview, and test the applicant's credibility in his or her own ways on the basis of as much pre-provided information as possible.
In relation to the screening interview
(a)
(b)
The problem may be that the asylum-seekers account, laboriously obtained via two languages, is not checked properly with the person being interviewed. So a mistake in interpretation, based on an answer given on an absence of preparation, could very easily go unnoticed by anyone.
After all, the Vietnamese asylum-seeker does not understand the interpreter's Cantonese. In this regard, the government says that:-
"Reading back is not practicable since the record is not
completed during the interview. This is because most interviews are conducted in Cantonese and Vietnamese, and the record is completed later in English.
Yet without reading-back, there is no way of checking that an asylum-seeker has been understood correctly. And this is on top of inadequate pre-screening preparation, so that the asylum-seeker's position may be stated badly, recorded wrongly, and unchecked. I have heard recently that officers will read back single answers if asked to do so; but the text from which they read back during the interview is not the text which forms the basis of the file, and is, I believe, destroyed. But this is theory. What about the facts? My own experience of one case, other lawyers' researches, and the findings of Amnesty International would seem to suggest that classic refugees are being missed. If that is so, where are the mistakes occurring, and why? And if such obvious cases are being missed, what, if anything, could that indicate?
The cure for the problem of reading-back is not to make the immigration officer's task yet more difficult by insisting on it happening. The cure is to do away with the need for most of the reading-back in the first place. This can be done by making the pre-screening information-gathering process and the immigration