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Abstract:
This study analyzes databases of merits decisions from all four levels of the asylum adjudication process: 133,000 decisions by 884 asylum officers over a seven year period; 140,000 decisions of 225 immigration judges over a four-and-a-half year period; 126,000 decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals over six years; and 4215 decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeal during 2004 and 2005. The analysis reveals significant disparities in grant rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country. In many cases, the most important moment in an asylum case is the instant in which a clerk randomly assigns an application to a particular asylum officer or immigration judge.

Using cross-tabulations based on public biographies, the paper also explores correlations between sociological characteristics of individual immigration judges and their grant rates. The cross tabulations show that the chance of winning asylum was strongly affected by whether or not the applicant had legal representation, by the gender of the immigration judge, and by the immigration judge's work experience prior to appointment.

In their conclusion, the authors do not recommend enforced quota systems for asylum adjudicators, but they do make recommendations for more comprehensive training, more effective and independent appellate review, and other reforms that would further professionalize the adjudication system.

immigration law, asylum law, refugee, consistency, asylum office, immigration court, Executive Office of Immigration Review, Board of Immigration Appeals, judicial decision-making

Abstract:
This article addresses two of the most pressing issues facing our society today - rights violations in anti-terrorism efforts and dysfunction in the immigration system - through a case study of the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings. Cataloguing the government's repeated presentation of unreliable and inaccurate information in support of its efforts to deport suspected terrorists, the paper outlines the individual, societal, and global harms resulting from this misuse of secret evidence. It then discusses relevant human rights law, which offers a particularly appropriate mechanism to address these harms through its careful balancing of national security interests and due process rights. The article advocates the use of human rights law as a guidebook and a yardstick to reform the administrative immigration process through statutory interpretation, regulation drafting, and institutional culture creation.

immigration law, international human rights law, secret evidence, convention against torture, refugee, administrative law, terrorism, due process

Abstract:
This piece (authored by Jaya Ramji-Nogales) examines an area long neglected in current discussions of Khmer Rouge accountability-reparations for victims. It discusses the Khmer Rouge tribunal law's silence on this matter and presents several arguments, drawing on international human rights law, for the tribunal's awarding of reparations notwithstanding this textual blindspot. The chapter then reviews the various goals reparations can achieve-restitution, rehabilitation, and reconciliation; the types of reparations that can be awarded; and the mechanisms, individual versus collective, that can be used to distribute reparations. Turning to the Cambodian context, it emphasizes the need for a comprehensive study to understand the opinions of Cambodians with respect to reparations. The piece concludes by suggesting several alternative approaches to reparations that are sensitive to Cambodian attitudes and the unique Cambodian cultural context.

The chapter comes from a book (co-edited by Beth Van Schaack and Jaya Ramji-Nogales) that explores the legal issues surrounding accountability for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and crimes of mass violence more generally. Comprising chapters authored by legal academics, lawyers, historians, artists, and others, the volume analyzes the complex problems inherent to such accountability efforts, and presents novel ideas as to how to address them. Three chapters examine aspects of accountability from the Cambodian and/or Theravada Buddhist perspective, a viewpoint that has rarely been considered before in this context. Other chapters present explanations for the failure of past accountability efforts, discuss holes in the law authorizing a tribunal for senior Khmer Rouge leaders, and outline the evidence available and how it can be used for such a trial. In addition to examining accountability in Cambodia from multiple perspectives, the book presents questions and ideas that affect all efforts to hold perpetrators accountable after widespread human rights violations. One particularly ground-breaking chapter questions the focus on top leadership in genocide trials, using Cambodia as a case study, and other chapters point to new directions in amnesty and reparations scholarship and practice. The book is accompanied by an online appendix of primary documents relevant to past, current and future accountability mechanisms in Cambodia.

Cambodia, reparations, international criminal law, hybrid tribunals, Khmer Rouge, transitional justice