NANSEN focuses here on the assessments of the credibility of conversions in Iranian cases, thus, the assessments of sincerity of religious belief in Iranian cases. This NANSEN Note discusses the assessment framework for determining the credibility of religious belief used by the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons and the Council for Immigration Disputes and how this is implemented in practice in Iranian cases.
For this note, 30 decisions on Iranian cases made by the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons and the Council for immigration Disputes were studied. We provide an analysis of asylum authorities’ decisions on initial applications in which conversion played a central role.
The analysis of the decisions selected reveals that
- the assessment of asylum authorities focuses on the consistency and coherence of statements concerning concrete activities and events that could lead to a risk of persecution,
- the asylum authorities in Iranian cases do not systematically make a comprehensive assessment of the motives for and process of conversions, knowledge of the new faith, or the applicants’ perception and experience of their faith,
- the lack of accurate and up-to-date information on Iran leads to careless assessments of the current situation on the ground.
The analysis further highlights that the information relied upon by Belgian asylum authorities appears to be neither up-to-date enough nor sufficiently accurate enough to carefully form a picture of all the risks entailed in returning to Iran.