ASYLUM INTERVIEWS IN THE UK 53 possibility standard’ must therefore be approached by drawing on as many different sources of information as possible (see also Mitsch and Reiling 2018). To establish evidence, asylum applicants are asked to prove their nationality or country of origin, usually in the form of a passport, an identity card, a birth certificate or other documents deemed relevant, such as food ration cards from a United Nations refugee camp. If no identity document is presented, as is mostly the case with applicants who claim to be stateless, processing the case becomes more complicated. A stateless person is defined in international law as ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’ (UN Convention 1954 Art. 1.1) and as such cannot or can no longer demand official identity documents from such an entity.3 While the UK established a separate statelessness determination procedure in 2013 that should guide a stateless person through the steps to officially claim their statelessness, this procedure is often not well known among stateless persons or their lawyers. Even when applied, the percentage of successful cases is in the single digits, with no right to appeal in case of a negative decision (Bezzano and Carter 2018; UNHCR 2020). The Asylum Information Database (AIDA), a database managed by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), does not even mention the statelessness determination procedure as a possible legitimate path towards staying in the UK. Thus, statelessness continues to be mostly addressed within the framework of regular asylum procedure. In these contexts, however, caseworkers or state officials begin questioning a stateless person on the basis of what Thomas McGee has called ‘citizen norms’ (2023: 3) that are applied in all country of origin assessments – norms that might not fit the particular circumstances of a stateless individual. As per standard procedure, the state representative tries to assess the nationality and/or the ethnicity, religion, political opinion or membership in a particular social group of the asylum seeker based on the applicant’s own account. Thus, the narration of the asylum seeker’s personal biography and history becomes pivotal. This takes place in the form of interviews carried out by caseworkers from the National Asylum Allocation Unit (NAAU) of the Home Office. First, a standardised ‘screening interview’ is conducted, during which the applicant’s personal details, biometric data, the reasons for the asylum claim and information on how the person entered the UK are collected. The case is then transferred to one of the Asylum Casework Units, which are located in different regions of the UK. There, an extended interview is conducted, which is obligatory regardless of an applicant’s individual motive for applying for asylum. During this interview, which can last several hours, the applicant interacts with a state representative, who compiles information about the asylum seeker’s individual life in the form of a legally viable ‘case’. In most instances, the representative (officially called the ‘decision-maker’) interviews the applicant with the help of an interpreter. The interviewee is not given any specific information about the type or length of answers expected from them; they are only asked whether they consider themselves to be in sufficiently good health to participate in the interview. One of the aims of an extended interview is to establish at an early stage whether the personal, social, political and cultural backgrounds provided by the asylum seeker justify the asylum application and whether the applicant’s personal story is consistent with the general knowledge about that person’s stated country of origin. Based on the answers