52 JUDITH BEYER I add to recent publications on how asylum seekers self-generate ‘evidence’ via their social media to support their asylum claim (Andreassen 2020; Laws 2024). I draw on ethnomethodology, particularly literature that focuses on the trans-sequential analysis of empirical data (Kolanoski 2018; Scheffer et al 2010), to analyse how evidence is produced asymmetrically in asylum interviews but is nevertheless co-constructed between state interviewer and asylum applicant. My article also contributes to anthropological literature that interrogates the role of anthropologists working as experts in various asylum systems. The literature can roughly be divided into two fields: one group of authors is critical of legal environments in which anthropologists’ engagements are confined to the so-called ‘cultural defence’, a type of argument that operates with essentialising notions of ‘culture’, ‘race’ or ‘identity’. Authors such as Melissa Demian (2008) thus emphasise the difficulties anthropologists face as experts in this domain of practice. The other set of authors sees anthropological engagement in asylum procedure in a more positive light and highlights possibilities for anthropologists to put their knowledge to use (e.g. Höhne 2016; Vetters and Foblets 2016). I position myself somewhat translaterally: while I consider anthropological involvement important, I argue that ‘the law’ itself prevents judges from openly acknowledging anthropological knowledge. Anthropological knowledge can inform a judge’s decision, but it will likely disappear behind established legal categories in the judge’s final written decisions. My article is structured in four parts. First, I summarise the asylum procedure in Britain, highlighting the country’s exit from the EU and the specific question of statelessness as two particularities that complicate the matter further. In the second part, I introduce the role of expert anthropologists and focus particularly on the question of ethics when working with ‘case material’. In the third part, I draw on empirical material from an asylum case in which I was involved as a country of origin expert. I demonstrate how ‘evidence’ is constructed and that the human subject disappears behind legal categories that are then subjected to scrutiny by agents of the state. In the fourth part, I discuss potentials and pitfalls of an applied legal anthropology in the context of asylum procedure. The Problem of Establishing Evidence In each asylum application it must first be clarified whether the person can be recognised as a refugee in line with the definition provided in the Geneva Refugee Convention, according to which a person is a refugee if they have a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’ (UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1954 Art. 1, para. 2). British asylum procedure also examines whether an asylum seeker requires humanitarian protection, whether expulsion from the UK would contravene Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights 1950, and whether a temporary or permanent residence permit should be granted. In the British system, it is generally assumed ‘that the risk in the country of origin cannot be definitively measured’ (Reiling and Mitsch 2017: 546) and that the so-called ‘real risk’ or ‘reasonable