ASYLUM INTERVIEWS IN THE UK 55 of little concern. I made this a point of ethnographic inquiry as I began to develop an interest in the very materials I received. It soon became evident to me that despite the fact that asylum has to be claimed on an individual basis, what the documentation creates is a ‘case’ which entails a de-individualisation of the person seeking asylum. The official transcripts also reveal that an asylum interview is a co-constructive practice in which both participants become unequal ‘partners’ (see Holstein and Gubrium 1997), united only in the fact that they both lack knowledge about the other. The ‘evidence’ generated in this way remains vague, and even the highly structured and formalised nature of the overall process cannot hide this fact. In the following, I discuss two excerpts from an extended interview with an asylum applicant who identified as a stateless Muslim Rohingya, without using names for people or places or quoting from my own expert opinion. I do, however, quote from the judge’s decision, as these decisions are generally publicly accessible – just as the court session would have been in which the appeal was heard.5 However, I find it necessary to further expand on the issue of ethics and informed consent in the context of this applied legal anthropological work. The reason I draw on this case material is not to specifically discuss anything from a given applicant’s biography, background or personality. Rather, I seek to trace how ‘evidence’ is being generated over the course of the asylum interviews. In interview transcripts of these asymmetrical encounters, one can witness how the individual disappears behind the ‘case’ that they inadvertently help constitute, without understanding the weight that will subsequently be given to some of their answers or their lack of knowledge and understanding. While I could, in theory, contact all asylum applicants for whose cases I have written expert reports and ask for their ‘informed consent’, for ethical reasons I would not do so. Contacting them would put them in a situation that would be as asymmetrical as the one they were made part of in their asylum interviews. If they found out that their asylum decision was successfully appealed also because I submitted a report on their case, there is no way for them to reciprocate for what they would understand as me having ‘helped’ them. It is not surprising that when colleagues do ask asylum seekers for their consent, the latter do not object to the anthropologist accessing their files (see, for example, Spotti 2019: 76). And if an asylum appeal in which I was involved was not successful, I would expect rejected applicants to categorise me as just another person who was not able to ‘help’ them. In the context of asylum, I have carefully weighted not trying to obtain informed consent from individual asylum applicants with wanting to shed light on a part of the asylum procedure that is usually not problematised for lack of data access.6 The following section demonstrates how asylum interviews generate standardised answers that fit into pre-defined legal categories with the aim to establish an applicant’s credibility or to discredit it. ‘Did You Not Try to Get More Information About Your Ethnicity?’ In contrast to the so-called screening interview, where questions are standardised and already typed out in a ready form, the back-and-forth in the more comprehensive extended interview generates more material that is specific to the conversation