Young people experiencing high-stakes decision making processes in Belgium: procedural (in)justice in the asylum procedure?

In this presentation, we delve into the question of how young people who are subjected to asylum procedures experience those procedures in Belgium by looking at these experiences from an empirical procedural justice perspective. As such, theories of procedural justice provide a conceptual framework that links specific experiences of procedural fairness to the prediction of general views about legal authority (Tyler, 1988). From this theoretical framework, the question arises whether and how in asylum procedures – as is the case with criminal or juvenile justice procedures – effective participation of young asylum seekers and their experiences of fairness will increase the aforementioned experiences of procedural justice. Whereas accounts on procedural justice have been established in criminal and juvenile justice procedures, research has largely lacked the voices of young asylum seekers. The results derived from a visual ethnography and intense collaboration with young people who directly or indirectly experienced asylum procedures, resulting in the short documentary Paper Borders. We conclude that young people refer to both injustices in the asylum procedure and to the unfairness of procedural outcomes. This invites academics to empirically
research procedural justice in light of specific settings, such as the high-stakes decision-making environment that (young) asylum seekers are confronted with.