Legal Geographies of Immigration Bail: Space, Time & Remote Hearings

There are significant spatial variations in how immigration law is applied both across Europe and within European countries. At the European level, fundamental differences exist between states both in the formal procedures used to determine refugee claims and the way that laws are implemented in practice (Gill & Good 2018). In countries such as Britain, immigration courts differ markedly according to the rate of success of appellants, the availability of legal representation, and the cultures within courts (Gill et al 2018; Burridge & Gill 2017). These differences mean that refugee determination is at least partly a matter of luck rather than justice, with potentially dire consequences for the unlucky ones.
National and European laws conceal these differences because they conceive of, and promulgate, abstract understandings of legal jurisdictions as internally coherent and spatially homogeneous. For example, the Common European Asylum System (CEAS)- the main piece of legislation at the European level that governs refugee claim determination - holds that there is no legally relevant difference between having your claim for asylum determined in Greece, Bulgaria, Sweden or France, despite the differences in success rates, legal procedures and socio-economic circumstances between these countries (Gill & Good 2018).

Legal geography is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field, which produces 'work of practical policy relevance as well as speaking truth to power' (Bartel et al 2013:349). To date, however, a systematic legal geographical analysis of immigration law has not been carried out. This research project seeks to fill this gap, asking:
1. How is space imagined in UK and EU immigration law?
2. To what extent, and how, does immigration law and practice vary across space in the UK and in the EU?
3. What are the causes and consequences for appellants of these variations: in particular in relation to access to justice?

Methodology entails ethnography and interviews. Two case studies will be adopted to explore the relationship between immigration law and space: British and Bulgarian asylum determination systems. The British Courts and Tribunals Service is undergoing a globally unprecedented modernisation. A central element of this modernisation is the introduction of digital technology in supporting legal processes. Yet despite this increasing use of video-link technology in the UK justice system, Gibbs (2017:4) highlights a 'dearth of research' into its impact. Ethnographic observations of physical and virtual hearings, alongside interviews with legal practitioners and appellants throughout the UK, will uncover the consequences of this profound mutation in the lawscape of British tribunals for asylum law.

At the European level, the CEAS was heavily modified in 2015 at the height of the so-called 'refugee crisis'. One source of innovations concerns the so-called 'Dublin' agreement, which allows for the legal deportation of asylum claimants to Europe's fringes, on the basis that legal procedures are comparable anywhere across Europe. While most fringe countries do not allow the public access to asylum appeals, Bulgaria stands out in allowing the public to observe its appeal system. An ethnography of the Bulgarian asylum appeal system in comparison to the British system will allow the candidate to explore the extent to which the quality of legal procedure is independent of its location across Europe.

To facilitate the Bulgarian fieldwork the Jo will spend a period of time - we expect four months - in Bulgaria regularly observing asylum appeals from the public area of the court. She will require overseas expenses to complete this section of the research, as well as training in Bulgarian.