Silence and Voice in Oral Hearings: Spatial, Temporal, and Relational Conditions for Communication in Asylum and Compulsory Care Hearings

Abstract

The legal right to be heard by a judge is an important human right. However, what happens if a claimant does not meet the requirements of legal communication when given the opportunity to be heard in court? In this article, I address this question by exploring how temporal, spatial, and relational conditions encourage or silence vulnerable claimants’ voices in asylum hearings and compulsory psychiatric care hearings in Swedish administrative courts. In addition, I analyze the multiple functions orality has when judges make decisions in these case types. The results provide nuance to claims in previous studies about the importance of enough time, spaces that signal solemnity, and flexibility in judges’ approaches to vulnerable claimants’ voices by demonstrating how these conditions interact with each other and generate different communicative atmospheres. Moreover, this study challenges the idea that oral hearings are necessarily beneficial for claimants as it demonstrates that under certain conditions orality can place claimants at a disadvantage and amplify their defenselessness. However, orality brings legitimacy to court proceedings even in these cases as it communicates justice to the public evaluating these procedures from a distance.

The Symbolic Life of Courts: How Judicial Language, Actions, and Objects Legitimize Credibility Assessments of Asylum Appeals

“…Rowden (2018) discusses how remote court hearings deteriorate the quality of the proceedings as the ceremonial aspects are lost, and Hambly and Gill (2020) make a similar remark regarding the negative consequences of rushed hearings in court. Johannesson (2022), in turn, demonstrates that the quality of the communication between claimants and judges is partly determined by what kinds of ceremonies are performed during court hearings. In addition, political scientists have demonstrated that when people start to mistrust the quality and fairness of state institutions, a self-fulfilling spiral of mistrust begins that risks eroding the quality of government and the effectiveness of the welfare state and the democratic system (Rothstein & Stolle, 2008).…”