Court hearings can silence vulnerable people despite giving them the legal right to speak
A Swedish study reveals that asylum seekers and psychiatric patients often cannot effectively use their right to be heard in court, even when judges grant them time to speak. The problem lies in how courtrooms are physically arranged, how much time is actually given, and judges' flexibility—conditions that interact to either enable or disable vulnerable claimants' voices.
Originaltitel: Silence and Voice in Oral Hearings: Spatial, Temporal, and Relational Conditions for Communication in Asylum and Compulsory Care Hearings
<p>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.</p>