TNAG-2329-FCO40-3373-Hong-Kong-contacts-with-academics-and-writers-1991 — Page 134

officer's questioning inter-related, with the latter working on facts presented in a shortened, agreed and approved format. There will be important areas in which this is not possible. Only in those areas will any form of reading-back be needed, and I believe that it could be done in a pre-designed checklist way. This needs more thought on the basis of "field-work" which I have yet to do. It will be essential that this stage of the process produces a file which can be reviewed by the RSRB. I examine its approach

below.

In relation to checking

(a)

The government says:-

♦

(b)

"UNHCR is provided with a copy of the file containing the

interview record as soon as possible after the interview, and therefore has the opportunity to rectify any omissions or errors, and to present these to the Review Board."

The

Here, I find the government's explanation rather difficult to follow. The first question is How can errors be identified? immigration officer's actual notes are not available to the UN, and may have been destroyed, so how can omissions or errors by the officer in compiling them or in transcribing them into English be identified? And if the UN was not at the interview, how does it know if there is an error? One way is on the say-so of the asylum-seeker in discussion with AVS. That is true, but it gives no way of distinguishing genuine error by the immigration officer from untruthful assertion later fabricated by the asylum-seeker. This is a very big gap indeed. Moreover, with no overall reading back of the file, nor sufficient checking with the asylum seeker at the interview, "omissions or errors" which are rectified by the asylum-seeker can too easily become contradictions or later fabrications in the eyes of the RSRB, if it puts threshold reliance on the immigration officer's notes. (He said such-and-such to the immigration officer, why is he now changing his story? etc.) I say "too easily", because no one wants the Review Board to be credulous; and, as I have said, some asylum-seekers may not be averse to exaggeration or invalid claims. So the need is to provide the systemic safeguards which allow the RSRB to be rigorous wherever it feels it appropriate. So I accept that the system has to allow the RSRB to rely on the immigration officer's notes in order to do this; but at present the prerequisites for doing so reliably seem to me to be absent. And if so, errors could be frequent. And there is evidence that the errors which happen are serious. And this is denied by the British and Hong Kong governments. And I find that rather worrying. I should like to know more.