Decision record 1007183 [2010] RRTA 930 : justice and history in a system of credibility -

Abstract

The following pages commit to a slow reading of a decision record from the Refugee Review Tribunal of Australia, which grants asylum to an elderly Iranian man for his anti-regime political opinion. The thesis seeks to read the record for how it codes this man’s past, and the past and future of his country, into a hegemonic formula of history and justice, to be made public under the code 1007183 [2010] RRTA 930 for its imagined, waiting spectators. Dividing its enquiry into two overlapping topics, the thesis first engages the record’s philosophy of history, studying the formal and temporal contours of its standard for evidence and reality, “credibility,” and the methods for establishing it. The second chapter takes up the content of the record’s legal and historical judgements, elaborating its conceptions of evil and justice to reveal a tautological process that posits secular legal code and legal reform as both the means and telos of legal and historical justice. The thesis concludes by combining these analyses while placing the record in its time, reading it as a document from 2010 determining the period 1979 to its present—a period marked by the end of existing socialism, the rise of modern political Islam, the reign of finance capital and neoliberal ideology, and the new salience of asylum processing as a site of political struggle. The thesis thus departs from a majority of scholarship on asylum processes, which typically targets certain procedural shortcomings and their impact on the asylum seeker’s fortunes, or attends to the subjectivities that crystallize out of the asylum encounter. Offering a novel analysis of asylum “credibility,” these pages ultimately focus on those putatively outside this encounter, its unwitting spectators, to suggest that prevailing academic and activist responses to present “refugee crises” risk recommitting to the post-Holocaust asylum system as they seek its reform. This system delivers history as a spectacle