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60 Osgoode Hall L. J. 127 (2023)
Sin of Omission: Exploring a Key Credibility Inference in Canadian Refugee Status Rejections

handle is hein.journals/ohlj60 and id is 127 raw text is: 127 Sin of Omission: Exploring a Key Credibility Inference in Canadian Refugee Status Rejections HILARY EVANS CAMERON* Refugee claimants in Canada must submit a Basis of Claim form to the Refugee Board before attending a hearing with the adjudicator who will decide their claim. On this form, they are expected to produce a written narrative that explains everything that is important about their experiences. At their hearing, many claimants encounter, for the first time, a key principle of Canadian refugee law: The omission of any important information from this narrative suggests that they have invented their claim. This studytakes a close look at how this omission from the narrative inference is operating within a set of judgments by Canadian refugee status adjudicators. It provides the first quantitative overview of the role that this inference plays in a sample of Canadian decisions as well as the first in-depth analysis of this kind of high-stakes legal reasoning. Negative credibility findings were at the heart of the decision to reject a large majority of the claimants in these decisions (72 percent; 217/303), and the adjudicators in these cases relied on an omission from the narrative inference in almost half of the decisions in which they concluded that the claimant was lying (49 per cent; 128/259). The major premise underlying this inference is that, in drafting their narrative, the claimant would have understood what information the Board expected them to provide. The claimants in these decisions raised strong challenges to this premise, and the adjudicators did not identify compelling support for it. At least in the context in which it currently operates in Canadian refugee hearings, Hilary Evans Cameron is an Assistant Professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University. The author wishes to acknowledge and thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this research. For their invaluable assistance, the author also wishes to thank Sean Rehaag, Jane Herlihy, Ema Ibrakovic, Talia Joundi, and the Osgoode Hall Law Journal's anonymous reviewers.

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