DOI: 10.5061/dryad.sxksn032f
title: ASYFAIR Germany dataset: asylum adjudication in Germany (2018/19)

description: The Project: ASYFAIR is a multi-disciplinary research project, employing a
 combination of methodologies to produce rich data sets on legal asylum
 procedures. The purpose of the study is to examine legal aspects of the
 Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which was reformed by the European
 Union in 2013 and that seeks to implement a set of standardise procedures
 of asylum determination. The ASYFAIR project offers the opportunity to
 assess progress towards harmonisation of asylum determination processes in
 Europe, and provides new conceptual frameworks with which to approach the
 dilemmas and risks of inconsistency in an area of law fraught with
 political controversy and uncertainty. The ASYFAIR project examines legal
 appeal procedures at court determining asylum in Europe, and has collected
 first-hand qualitative and quantitative data at asylum courts in the UK,
 Germany, France, Austria and Belgium, as well as interview data in Italy
 and Greece. The project is at the interface between critical human
 geography, anthropology, border studies and law. Conceptually, ASYFAIR
 data connects to work on legal consistency, legal pluralism, the
 universalism and omnipresence of law, legal speeds, barriers to access to
 justice, the effects of waiting and delay in asylum claim determination,
 judicial worldviews and biases, the relative impotence of information in
 the face of legal reasoning, responsibility offloading from first instance
 to appeal procedures, the usefulness of judicial panels, and the frequency
 with which narratives are interpreted in court discourse. The unique
 feature of the ASYFAIR project is that relatively little academic work has
 examined how asylum court hearings are conducted in practice. Aggregate
 data on outcomes (verdicts by judges) and general asylum data is available
 publicly or on request from courts, but there has been little scrutiny of
 the actual events during court hearings, obscuring procedural justice and
 inconsistency. ASYFAIR examines what happens during asylum appeal
 hearings, and explores how legal processes may vary according to factors
 such as the court location, the scheduling of hearings, legal and
 governmental representation in hearings, as well as factors such as
 gender, age and attire of individuals, the country of origin, native
 language and religion of asylum appellants, and certain demeanours of
 participants, and their (assumed) preparation for hearings. The
 quantitative data on Germany that this websites makes available offers a
 unique insight into legal procedures in asylum determination by presenting
 what is happening during asylum court hearings.
description: <b>Methodology</b>:
 ASYFAIR uses a variety of research methods. The primary data-collection is
 based on multi-sited, ethnographic observations of public asylum court
 hearings, as well as interviews. The data made available (<i>ASYFAIR
 Germany Quantitative Data Set</i>) is based on a quantitative survey
 conducted in conjuncture with ethnographic court observations at German
 courts from 2018-2019. The survey tool (<i>ASYFAIR Germany Pro
 Forma</i>) was composed by ASYFAIR researchers following a pilot
 study at courts in early 2018, and builds on the previous work in the UK
 by the ASYFAIR’s PI Dr. Nick Gill. The <i>Pro Forma</i> was
 completed by the researcher responsible for conducting ethnographic
 observations in Germany. The original .pdf file was editable, and
 completed electronically by the researcher, and the data from this survey
 tool was exported as a .xlxs file, and compiled in one .xlxs file, which
 was later analysed with the quantitative data mining software
 SPSS. The data set is likely to be of interest both to
 academic communities like geographers, legal and border scholars, and
 anthropologists, as well as to policy makers and activists working in
 refugee status determination.
description: ASYFAIR: Fair and consistent asylum adjudication? A critical,
 multi-methodological and interdisciplinary study of asylum court hearings
 in Europe Principle Investigator (PI): Dr. Nick Gill,
 University of Exeter (UK),  http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6064-8157
 Lead Researcher: Dr. Nicole Hoellerer, University of Exeter
 (UK), https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6672-1156  The
 ASYFAIR project is hosted by the University of Exeter (UK) and has
 received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the
 European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under
 grant agreement No. StG-2015_677917.  ASYFAIR website:
 www.asyfair.com <b>The Data Set and
 Notes</b>: The data made available (<i>ASYFAIR Germany
 Quantitative Data Set</i>) contains quantitative data from the
 ASYFAIR survey, based on 270 court observations at German administrative
 courts from 2018-2019. Sensitive, case-specific and ethnographic
 information whose disclosure could pose the risk of being identified (such
 as the names of participants and case file numbers), or pose a real risk
 of harm to individual asylum appellants (such as details about the asylum
 claim, mental and/or physical health), as well as free-text fields
 describing details for various sections of the survey, have been removed
 from the data set to preserve anonymity. In some instances, data has been
 edited for simplification. In a few instances, ASYFAIR researchers added
 variables (columns) to the survey data set after data collection for ease
 of data analysis (for example, variables of the presence of
 participants). The notes on the data set
 (<i>ASYFAIR Germany Quantitative Data Set Notes</i>) outlines
 descriptions of each of the 1,334 variables (columns) in the data set. The
 notes also indicate where data has been removed (R), edited (E) or added
 (A). We also
 provide a list of the acronyms used in the data set (<i>ASYFAIR
 Germany Quantitative Data Set Acronyms</i>). The Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf)
 <i>ASYFAIR Germany Pro Forma</i> shows the original ASYFAIR
 survey tool. The
 read-me file (<i>ASYFAIR Germany Data Set READ ME)
 </i>provides some notes that may assist with reading the data and
 using the data set. <b>Usage of Data</b>:
 Individuals who use the ASYFAIR data set, are requested to cite the data
 set (e.g. DOI) made available here. <b>Contact</b>: For
 queries, please contact the ASYFAIR team at asyfair@exeter.ac.uk, or see the project website www.asyfair.com.