People fleeing repression in their homelands often have trouble recalling details of traumatic events, but this does not mean their accounts are untrue, according to psychologists and other experts.

Under the 1951 UN convention on refugees, asylum seekers must demonstrate a "well-founded fear" of persecution in their home countries, a standard that is inherently subjective and hard to prove.

New research supports the contention of refugee advocates that discrepancies do not necessarily reflect on the honesty of witnesses but may be the result of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

The study, published last month in the British medical journal The Lancet , emerged from repeated interviews during 1999 and 2000 with a group of 27 Kosovar and 12 Bosnian refugees who had been granted asylum in Britain by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"None of the participants had given accounts of their experiences to gain their asylum status," meaning they had no reason to lie or exaggerate, said the study's authors, Jane Herlihy and Stuart Turner of the Traumatic Stress Clinic and Peter Scragg of University College London.

They found that people commonly mixed up details of their accounts of rape, murder and human rights abuses, and that smaller details were more likely to be confused than central aspects of the story.

"For example, one participant changed his description of his treatment by military police from 'we were slapped around' to 'we were badly beaten'," the authors said. "He may simply have been in a different mood state in each interview, thus giving different evaluations of his experience."

"The assumption that inconsistency of recall means that accounts have poor credibility is questionable," they said. "These findings cannot be explained on the grounds of intent to deceive."

Post-traumatic stress

In addition to depression, many refugees suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This typically appears within three months of a shocking or terrifying ordeal such as combat, natural disaster, torture or other physical violence. Symptoms include emotional numbness, sleeplessness and an inability to control disturbing memories.

Doctors and advocates who work with asylum-seekers said it is common for aspects of their stories to change between interviews, even when they appear to have valid claims.

"It's very difficult for the asylum seeker to be consistent," said Maki Katoh, programme coordinator of the New York City Human Rights Clinic of Doctors of the World, which evaluates the mental and physical health of asylum seekers to strengthen their applications.

"They get confused, they don't know how to store the memories," she said. "Even when we conduct two interviews in a matter of a month, the story could change. They might remember two people one day, the next day they remember three people."

And "just a slight discrepancy could make a big difference" in whether a claim is approved or denied, she added.

Slightly more than half of the refugees evaluated at the New York clinic show physical scars or markings from torture, Katoh said. "More than 95 percent of those are consistent with their stories, and in the rest, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bogus case."

Evaluating claims of persecution is a difficult and inherently subjective job, said experts and asylum officers themselves.

One US asylum officer interviewed for a television documentary called Well-Founded Fear put it this way: "I think you certainly become very cynical. And I think at some point, you don't want to take crap from people, that you certainly don't want to do. If you gain anything from this job, it's that. I mean, in the beginning, you're more reasonable, you're more naive, and your grant rate's probably a lot higher."

Another said: "On its face, it's a fairly simple job: you're basically deciding whether or not an individual meets the definition of a refugee...But, you know, you can get into so many little back alleys through that, that, uh...sometimes it boggles the mind."

Months or years spent waiting between interviews can also be a critical factor. "Cases become weaker as time passes," said Regina Germain, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who runs an assistance programme for refugees at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies. "How do you know you're still endangered (in your home country)? Plus the ability to recall is impaired."

The Lancet study confirms this, and notes that discrepancies multiply with length of time between interviews.

Credibility issue

Bill Frelick, a policy director at the Washington-based US Committee for Refugees, agreed that credibility is essential and that "it really depends how much weight adjudicators give to those inconsistencies."

"Some, if they catch someone in any inconsistency, their credibility just plummets," he said. "Others are much more inclined to see the whole picture and recognise that we're not dealing with historians here who are observing the unfolding of traumatic events, but people who themselves are the victims."

Other stumbling blocks in making an accurate asylum assessment are the limitations of interviewing through an interpreter and the relatively brief amount of time — about two hours in the United States — in which the asylum officer must establish trust with the claimant.

According to statistics from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service, about one-fourth of all asylum applications between 1991 and 2000 were granted.

All this has implications for the increasingly draconian asylum policies of many countries, the Lancet study said.

Most important would be shortening the length of time between interviews, and training asylum officers to recognise that changes in so-called "peripheral details" of a particular event should not be used as a reliable barometer of truthfulness. (IPS)