A core impediment to refugee applicants providing a credible narrative account of their claims to protection is the profound fragmentation and unpredictability of the structure, content and conduct of the oral hearing. This chapter argues that the conduct of the oral hearing severely fragmented applicants’ testimony in three key ways: reverse-order questioning; decision-makers’ abrupt subject switching during the hearing; and questions pertaining to time, sequencing and precise dates of events. This leads to the conclusion that applicants were both expected to present their oral evidence in a form that fulfilled the credibility criteria and the demand for narrative, and actively impeded in their efforts to do so. Further, where applicants displayed an ability to present evidence in a narrative form, in all but a minority of hearings this was done despite, rather than because of, the structure and setting of the hearing.

This concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book. It argues that efficiency should not be limited to case disposition but should be looked at more holistically. Procedural justice theory offers valuable insights into how this may be achieved. Moreover, instead of solely focusing on reaching a guilty plea as early as possible, the criminal process should be recalibrated to ensure that the plea decision is indeed an informed and voluntary choice by the defendant. This chapter concludes by discussing areas of future research.

In private international law, the traditional view has been that all aspects of the burden of proof are procedural. It is typically inferred that a forum court properly uses the law of the forum on such matters even when comity dictates the recognition and application of the substantive law of another jurisdiction to the matter in dispute. However, this characterization has never been entirely accurate, at least in American law. Moreover, there has been discernible movement toward the opposite conclusion over the last century. In order to make sense of this, it is necessary to recognize that the two components of the burden of proof, the burden of persuasion and the burden of production, have quite different functions in an adversary system. Once these functions are identified, it becomes clear that only the burden of production, in both its allocation and the severity of the burden that it imposes, should be governed by forum law, while the burden of persuasion, in both its allocation and the severity of the burden that it imposes, should be treated as part of the substantive law that the forum court chooses to apply.