Trovärdighetsbedömningar av asylsökande med traumatiska minnen

Sammanfattning: The right to seek asylum is a fundamental right for all refugees worldwide. In order to receive status as a refugee, the person must feel a well founded fear of being persecuted upon returning to his country of nationality. When a person flees his country to seek asylum, the escape often results in that the person has few or no personal belongings or important documents which he can use to prove his status as a refugee or identity with. Because of the vulnerable situation that the refugee is in, there are some ways to make the evaluation of evidence more beneficial to the person seeking asylum. The evidence is often solely based on the applicant's statement, and therefore the statement often determines whether the application is granted or not. The statement then becomes the subject of a credibility assessment. The credibility assessment aims to determine whether the person is considered to be credible in their pleaded asylum grounds or not, and thus can be given the rule “benefit of the doubt” that allows the persons claims to be the basis of a granted asylum. If the person is deemed not to be credible, the rule does not apply. Nearly all refugees have experienced some type of traumatic event before arriving in the country where they apply for asylum. Furthermore, memory research shows that traumatic events can affect both the ways in which a memory is encoded in the brain, how a person experiences the event and how reporting is done afterwards. Despite this all asylum seekers are assessed according to the same criteria in a credibility assessment.