A matter of value. Exploring what underlies adjudication in the French Court of Asylum

In this paper, I examine the decision-making process in the French Court of Asylum, which reviews appeals about decisions of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, granting or refusing refugee status. I consider the relationship between the substantial refusals of the claims and the adjudicators’ conception of what asylum is. Drawing on data collected between 2009 and 2011 over 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Court, I argue that refugee status is imagined as an ideal and that it is therefore very difficult to consider real claimants worthy of it.