I was an asylum judge - here's how we spot liars and Home Office mistakes

From mental health to data protection, Robin Callender Smith heard all kinds of cases during his career as a tribunal judge. By far the most testing work, he found, was ruling on asylum appeals – for one very stark reason.

“If you get it wrong,” he says, “you’re sending people back to their deaths.”

Many individuals who appeared before him faced a “real prospect of danger” if they lost their appeals and returned to regimes that might imprison, torture or execute them, Callender Smith explains.

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Plenty of others had weaker cases or were lying about their situations, which may present national security risks and risk further enflaming the UK’s divisions over immigration.

But when people have genuinely escaped faraway lands in panic and fear, often their evidence is thin. This is what makes the job of deciding who is telling the truth so difficult, says Callender Smith – and why judges currently have to be qualified lawyers with at least five years of legal experience.

Many experts think the UK’s system of dealing with these appeals is broken, however.

While the Home Office has greatly reduced the number of cases awaiting initial decisions by its case workers, the backlog of appeals due to be heard by judges has risen by 70 per cent in the last year – reaching a record high of 114,000 people. They’re often in limbo for an average of more than 15 months before learning their fate.

The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, says the tribunal is “overwhelmed” by people “gaming the system, lodging vexatious appeals”.

Her solution? Replace judges in appeals with members of the public. They may have no background in law but will be trained as independent adjudicators, similar to magistrates, working under a new Independent Immigration Appeals Authority.

The Home Office says this would “expand the range of suitable candidates while maintaining fairness”, to get through cases more quickly, “with safeguards to ensure high standards”.

Callender Smith, a former barrister who served as a part-time immigration and asylum judge from 2006 to 2017, thinks this “legal-lite” idea is highly risky.

If the people making these life-changing decisions aren’t “filtered” by law degrees and experience in the justice system, he fears a “Wild West” – where people from both ends of the political spectrum make biased decisions, rather than focusing on the law and the facts in each case.

“You’ve really got to do things carefully… You’ve got to have a legal ‘spine.”

The Home Office’s initial decisions are made by caseworkers who don’t need law qualifications. Callender Smith worries these officials are under pressure to rush through cases, and could potentially miss important evidence, which makes it vital that appeals are considered by experts as a safe backstop.

Calling the Home Office “a place of great darkness”, he believes it “wants to say no all the time – it doesn’t matter if that’s a Labour no or a Conservative no”.

In some cases, he says, people have been told they are not torture victims, only for appellants to then tell judges: “Have a look at the scars on my back and you’ll see that I’ve been burned.”

He wishes more people could meet victims like this to understand that “not all asylum seekers are lying bastards”.

At other hearings, however, things aren’t always what they seem.

Only 2 per cent of asylum claims involve people saying their sexuality endangers them – in home nations where homosexuality is illegal and violent homophobia is rife – but these can be the trickiest cases.

Callender Smith recalls one appeal in which two men claimed they were gay. They produced photos of themselves holding hands, which seemed to be from years gone by, claiming this was evidence of a long-term relationship. But Callender Smith noticed a detail that “revealed a defect in their story”.

“They started backtracking… I was able to say: ‘No, this is what that photograph shows, and that’s not what you’re telling me.” He refused their appeal.

At another “extraordinary” hearing, however, an Iranian man claimed to be gay – and was backed up by his own wife. It’s the sort of case that immediately sounds dubious and could provoke outrage, but digging into the details, Callender Smith realised they were telling the truth.

“They’d grown up together,” he explains. “She knew he was gay and had married him to protect him from what would happen if his sexuality became known.”

Callender Smith says the Home Office accused them of lying to avoid being sent back to Iran. “That was confounded by an independent childhood friend who gave independent evidence confirming their story… That was irrefutable. It wasn’t a setup, it was a true human situation.”

Immigration and asylum judges have 21 days to make their decisions and provide detailed legal reasonings.

Paul Housego served for a decade until 2024 and says: “It is very stressful and very hard work – at least it is if you do it properly.”

He thinks it’s “nonsense” to expect people without legal qualifications and experience “to do what a skilled, experienced judge does”.

“The bundles of documents are huge,” he explains. “You have to pull out the right information in no time at all. You have to spot the gaps they have left, as well as assess whether accounts have material inconsistencies. Then you have to write appeal-proof decisions.”

He says the number of appeals would fall if the Home Office made “better decisions in the first place”. In more than a third of appeal cases, the department reverses its decisions before they reach a tribunal hearing – and of the remaining cases that do go before judges, asylum seekers still win 40 per cent of them.

“Grant the easy ones,” urges Housego. “Why waste everyone’s time?” He adds: “And do a proper job on the others, removing those who lose… rather than doing nothing and allowing them to make a new claim five years later.”

The Government points out that nearly 70,000 illegal migrants and foreign criminals have been returned or deported since Labour came to power.

Under the Immigration and Asylum Bill, the new appeals authority would start work in late 2027. The Government says it will prioritise faster removals of “high-harm foreign offenders”, stop people making multiple claims and tackle any human rights cases “that are clearly without merit”.

But the Law Society strongly opposes the reforms which “would damage our right to a fair hearing”. Baroness Butler-Sloss, a former Court of Appeal judge, has also questioned whether the training will be sufficient.

To help reduce the backlog, Callender Smith suggests older judges should not be forced to retire at 70 and could help filter out cases before they reach tribunals.