By Syed Muhammad Ihsan Haider
In April 2026, a BBC investigation carried out undercover revealed a scenario which surprised many, even though it should have been foreseeable. Various immigration advisers in the UK instructed migrants to appear gay when applying for asylum. These advisers told them which clubs to go to for photographs, how to prepare a script about a same-sex relationship, and what story to tell in interviews. The Home Office did call this an abuse of the system, and that was correct. However, the more alarming question is as to how the system permitted such behavior to occur so easily. This article contends that the problem does not lie in the dishonesty of the applicants but in the way in which sexual orientation and Gender identity (SOGI) asylum claims are evaluated. The mechanisms intended to detect fraud are in fact facilitating the fraud. It is worth noting that the BBC’s report was contested from different parts of the sector, with some flagging it as the overstatement of the problem. Whether or not one accepts the view, the structural question it surfaces warrants some serious attention.
When There Is Nothing to Show
In most asylum cases, credibility assessment forms part of the broader body of evidence. for example, a journalist who is persecuted can produce articles, and a political dissident can refer to arrest records or threats. However, in cases relating to sexual orientation or gender identity, the focus of the assessment is on the applicant’s inner life – specifically, their sexual orientation or gender identity: which cannot be verified externally. In this situation, there are no documents, no physical evidence, and no witnesses who can provide corroboration in any real sense. Credibility assessment does not act as supplementary evidence in SOGI cases; it is the evidence itself.
At one time, this was not the way things were done. In the past, adjudicators across European and other jurisdictions have employed very intrusive methods such as examinations of a person’s sexual behavior, psychological testing, and questions concerning intimate activities to establish the truth of a claim. Such methods are now mostly forbidden on grounds of privacy and dignity. In A, B and C v Staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie (CJEU, 2014), the court prohibited video evidence of sexual acts as a violation of human dignity. In F v Bevándorlási és Állampolgársági Hivatal (CJEU, 2018), psychological testing was declared illegal on the same grounds. However, banning them has created a vacuum, and so something has had to take their place.
Several informal proxies based on identifiable aspects of queer identity, such as coming-out stories, participation in the community, the consistency of one’s statements, and visible involvement with LGBTQ+ culture have been used to fill this gap. More recently, structured approaches such as the Difference, Shame, Stigma, Harm (DSSH) model have tried to go beyond these kinds of markers by concentrating on the common psychological experiences that applicants had regarding feelings of shame, concealment, or self-recognition rather than focusing on their sexual behavior or identity performance. The aim had been to create something that was more culturally fair and less intrusive.
However, the DSSH model fails to overcome the problem it was intended to solve; instead, it shifts the issue elsewhere. The idea that a true queer individual from a homophobic country must have undergone feelings of shame, practice concealment, and go through a slow process of self-recognition is in fact a narrative that is specific to a certain culture. It follows a particular psychological journey for the development of queer identity that is characteristic of the West. A person whose same-sex desire was never given a name – neither celebrated nor officially persecuted, merely left unspoken – might not have such an experience. Their experience is real enough but doesn’t match the established pattern. In a system which operates on such templates, not fitting the pattern is no different from lying.
The Paradox the System Built
The reaction to the BBC’s investigation was as one would expect. Politicians demanded that the system be subject to stricter scrutiny, and the Home Office committed itself to hunting down fraudulent advisers. Yet this response fails to address the real issue. The problem is not merely about who is exploiting the system. The problem is why the system is so easy to exploit.
For some time now, scholars have observed that SOGI asylum assessments function as what Nuno Ferreira (2023) refers to as a test of sexual veracity through honest performance – a process which acknowledges some expressions of queer identity while making others disappear. However, there is an additional aspect that this explanation does not fully consider. The performative script that the adjudicators use is not only culturally biased but also something that can be learned, and since it is learnable, it can be coached. The BBC investigation provided clear evidence of this in practice – it showed advisers teaching their clients which clubs to go to, how to describe a relationship, and what emotional storyline to perform during an interview. The anti-fraud mechanism had thus become the fraud manual.
The paradox underlying SOGI credibility assessment is this: a system intended to tell the difference between genuine claimants and frauds has ended up with a set of criteria that are so carefully scripted and so easy to teach that it has excluded precisely the wrong sort of people. People who have the means, access to advisers, and the opportunity for coaching to carry out the required identity script can pass, while those who do not – and most importantly, those whose real experience of same-sex desire does not fit within that script – are not.
Imagine someone coming from a culture in which same-sex desire exists but is never given a name, never developed into an identity, and never expressed in any way that can be recognized. There is no coming-out story, no community, and no clear sequence involving shame, concealment, and eventual self-acceptance. The person’s account is fragmented, non-linear, and therefore culturally unfamiliar to the judge. Within the present system, this fragmentation is seen as inconsistency. Inconsistency is then interpreted as implausibility. Implausibility in turn is taken to mean fraud. As a result, a genuine applicant is rejected, while a fraudster who has been coached and has photographs as well as a prepared narrative is allowed through.
The system has a failure in both directions: it is too porous for people who learn the script and too rigid for those who cannot carry it out. This is not a defect which can be corrected by making the assessment criteria stricter, since stricter criteria would only make the script more specific and thus more teachable. The issue is not with the quality of the assessment but with the epistemological foundations on which the entire system is based.
A Different Starting Point
Fixing SOGI credibility assessment does not mean building a better script. It means questioning whether the script should exist at all. There are three more general avenues that lead to a more defensible method.
The first point is to take the country-of-origin information more seriously. Adjudicators tend to underestimate the variety of ways in which same-sex desire is experienced in different cultural settings. In many places around the world, same-sex desire is not publicly celebrated and is not formally persecuted either – it just exists, nameless and without a narrative, outside the systems which Western identity models take for granted. A person coming from such a background will not have a coming-out story since coming out is not a category in their culture. Improved country-of-origin information would not only inform adjudicators about the legal situation in the countries of origin but also broaden their understanding of what real queer life is like beyond the situations they are used to.
Another approach involves rethinking what sexual orientation means. The framework currently employed in most asylum systems is based on a Western, identity-focused model that is, sexuality as a stable internal trait which a person discovers, names, and expresses. However, even within Western philosophy and queer theory, this model is disputed and does not well reflect the real experiences of many applicants. A more appropriate framework should acknowledge that same-sex desire can exist without having to attach identity labels, without involving a community, and without requiring the kind of coherent narrative that adjudicators are used to looking for. This does not simplify the assessment process. On the contrary, it makes the assessment more honest about what it is attempting to do.
The third area is that of epistemic authority. Currently, the credibility assessment procedure places a great deal of power in the hands of the adjudicator when it comes to deciding if the claimant’s version of events is plausible. The claimant’s own testimony is subject to the adjudicator’s cultural assumptions before it can be regarded as evidence. Drawing on Medina’s (2013) concept of differential epistemic authority, if this balance were changed by giving applicants more control over how their own experience is told and evaluated – it would not remove the need for a credibility assessment. It would, however, lessen the degree to which the process itself generates the implausibility that it aims to identify.
The framework that is the subject of my doctoral research is a form of limited right to opacity, whereby the responsibility for assessing credibility is shifted from verifying identity to evaluating the risk of persecution, so that claimants can keep to themselves the kind of detailed information which the present system requires without this silence working against them. Although this is still an early argument, the line it indicates is clear: a system which recognizes what people cannot or ought not to have to prove is more likely to arrive at the correct answer than one which requires a performance that the system has itself set out.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
The BBC’s investigation into false claims of homosexuality among asylum seekers was generally presented as being about fraud; it is in fact more accurately seen as a story concerning institutional failure. The fraudsters had not tricked the system; instead, the system provided them with the means to carry out their actions.
If credibility assessments are based on a script that can be taught, coached, and bought, the outcome is not only that false claims are successful but also that genuine ones fail. Once these failures come to light – when enquiries reveal the discrepancy between what the system promises and what it delivers – the harm extends beyond. Overall trust declines, politicians respond by introducing stricter restrictions, and since refugees are already one of the most vulnerable groups in the system, they are portrayed as suspects. The epistemological failure of the assessment system then provides a reason for making the system more severe, which in turn makes it less accurate and leads to further failures.
The issue isn’t dishonesty, but rather the way the system is structured. If the system is based on the wrong foundations, it will continue to produce the wrong results, no matter how many advisers are arrested or how strict the criteria become. To get it right, one must begin from a different starting point.
References
BBC News (2026, April). Law firms helping migrants pretend to be gay to stay in the UK. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c937wldkkw8o
Berg, L. and Millbank, J. (2009). Constructing the personal narratives of lesbian, gay and bisexual asylum claimants. Journal of Refugee Studies, 22(2), 195–223. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fep010
Court of Justice of the European Union (2014). A, B and C v Staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie, Joined Cases C-148/13 to C-150/13, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2406, judgment of 2 December 2014. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62013CJ0148
Court of Justice of the European Union (2018). F v Bevándorlási és Állampolgársági Hivatal, Case C-473/16, ECLI:EU:C:2018:36, judgment of 25 January 2018. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62016CJ0473
Dustin, M. and Ferreira, N. (2021). Improving SOGI asylum adjudication: Putting persecution ahead of identity. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 40(3), 315–347. https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdab005
Ferreira, N. (2023). Utterly unbelievable: the discourse of ‘fake’ SOGI asylum claims as a form of epistemic injustice. International Journal of Refugee Law, 34(3-4), 303–334. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eeac041
Jansen, S. and Spijkerboer, T. (2011). Fleeing homophobia: Asylum claims related to sexual orientation and gender identity in Europe. VU University Amsterdam. https://www.refworld.org/reference/research/vuamsterdam/2011/en/82674
Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-epistemology-of-resistance-9780199929047
Millbank, J. (2009). ‘The Ring of Truth’: A case study of credibility assessment in particular social group refugee determinations. International Journal of Refugee Law, 21(1), 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/een040
UNHCR (2012). Guidelines on international protection no. 9: Claims to refugee status based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity. https://www.unhcr.org/media/guidelines-international-protection-9-claims-refugee-status-based-sexual-orientation-and
Syed Muhammad Ihsan Haider is a doctoral researcher at the Research Training Group 2987 (Mobility Rights in the Global Context of Multiple Crises) at the University of Göttingen. His dissertation examines the normative foundations of credibility assessment in queer asylum proceedings, with a primary grounding in philosophy.
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