Finding Religion: Assessing Religion-Based Asylum Claims in Refugee Status Determination Procedures in Norway and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines refugee status determination (RSD) procedures in Norway and Canada, focusing on religious conversion claims. It is structured in two parts. The first describes the features of RSD in both countries, including the standards of review and legal precedents used by courts. The second part explores how international human rights law defines ‘religion’ and how Norwegian and Canadian courts handle religious conversion cases. The study highlights the shift from knowledge-based assessments to consideration of personal reflections after the introduction by UNHCR in 2004 of guidelines to assist in dealing with religion-based claims for protection. Using document analysis of 200 appellate cases from 2012 to 2022, the article assesses the credibility, the role of testimonies, and the level of religious knowledge and practice in these claims. It also discusses the influence of country-specific conditions on RSD procedures and the courts’ reliance on domestic and international legal precedents. It concludes by comparing the different approaches and outcomes in assessing religious conversion claims in the two jurisdictions, emphasizing the need for nuanced understanding and evaluation of individual cases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".