The hole of the donut: how the person deciding on someone's asylum claim uses his or her own personal discretionary space
Can I have your attention for a very interesting article on decisionmaking regarding asylum. While people have to work within a legal framework the person who interviews or decides has a certain freedom and people also work differently.
"On the third day of the asylum procedure, the asylum seeker will be given the opportunity to explain why he fled from his country of origin.[1] During the interview, his asylum motives will therefore take centre stage. An interpreter will be present during this interview, and a volunteer from the Netherlands Refugee Network or the asylum seeker’s lawyer may be present, but often is not. On the basis of this interview, the Immigration and Naturalization Department (IND) decision-maker will assess the merits of the asylum application in combination with what the IND knows about the situation in the country of origin. This interview is largely free of form. The hearing officer asks a number of standard questions that are prescribed in the format, but the core of the interview is the so-called “free narrative.” The asylum seeker is given the opportunity to tell in his own words why he left his country of origin. The hearing officer then uses this story as a starting point to come to a decision on the asylum claim.
[Severijns calls the space in which the IND worker makes this decision, “discretionary space.”]
(p. 250)
The essence of discretionary space is the freedom to make choices
within it. In the theoretical framework of this research, I use Ronald
Dworkin’s analogy of discretionary space as “the hole in the donut.”
According to Dworkin, the hole in which freedom of choice exists is
surrounded by a ring of rules. The choices made are legitimate so long
as they remain within the limits set by the rules….From the perspective
of IND employees, the donut ring is formed not only by regulations, but
also by the procedural, organizational, and social contexts within which
IND employees have to work. In practice, the rules do not determine how
much discretionary space they encounter. Rather, the expectations of
IND staff about the ways in which the rules 
must be interpreted and to what extent the organization is capable of directing and controlling the behavior of IND staff, hold sway."
Continu your reading on the original page: https://artseverywhere.ca/2020/07/22/refugees-stories/
Ralph Severijns (1982) is a part-time fellow at the Centre for State and Law of the Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands). He studied European and International Public Law at Tilburg University, also in the Netherlands. Ralph became interested in refugee issues during his studies when he volunteered for the Dutch Refugee Council and later interned for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), in Turkey. After completing his studies Ralph spent two years working as a policy officer for the Dutch Ministry of Justice, after which he joined the Dutch Committee on Migration Affairs as a senior advisor, which he combined with writing his PhD (published in 2019 as Zoeken naar zekerheid). Ralph was awarded his doctorate by Radboud University in October 2019. He currently works as an advisor on migration issue for the Netherlands Red Cross.
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