The coroner decides which witnesses to call and their designation. This chapter gives practical advice for the professional who is called as a witness of fact.

To access refugee protection in Australia and Canada, refugee applicants must speak. They must present their oral testimony in person, repeatedly and at length, unmediated by a legal representative or advocate, and in many cases without the benefit of documents, witnesses or other forms of evidence to verify their claims. This book is about the oral evidence that refugees are compelled to give, the stories they are required to narrate, and the genres of storytelling they are required to master during administrative oral hearings for the assessment of refugee status in Australia and Canada. This introductory chapter establishes the book’s central concerns, namely: what the presentation, interrogation and assessment of testimony during the oral hearing tell us about the refugee subject whom Refugee Convention-signatory states judge as authentic, credible and, ultimately, acceptable. It then carefully connects the demand for narrative within RSD with the intractable problems of credibility assessment. Finally, it interrogates the role of law, lawyers and interpreters in shaping the refugee testimony and analysis presented throughout the book.

This chapter argues that a distinct stock story of who refugees are and how they behave, which it describes as the ‘stock narrative of becoming a refugee’, featured throughout the hearings. This stock story is one version of how, when and why ‘genuine’ refugees decide to leave their home countries and seek refugee status in another state. The chapter analyses the extent to which this prescriptive narrative conforms with international and domestic definitions of refugee status, to show that the normative expectations embedded within the stock tale far exceed the legal basis for refugee protection. Nonetheless this story, with its distinct narrative form, was demanded of refugee applicants during oral hearings and structured how decision-makers tested and judged applicants’ evidence and credibility. While decision-makers frequently demanded evidence that conformed to the stock narrative of authentic refugeehood – or that applicants to account for deviations from this narrative – refugee applicants also implicitly or explicitly contested or resisted this demand when presenting their oral testimony.

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 chapter focuses on two feature-length documentaries by the Chinese director Wang Bing – He Fengming and Dead Souls – that present the testimonies of individuals accused of being rightists by CCP officials during the Anti-Rightist movement and thereby sent to the Jiabiangou “reeducation through labor” camp. The chapter argues that these two films seek to address the trauma suffered by former rightists who received no official apology nor compensation. Both films describe the marks left by these past events in the minds of witnesses, but they are constructed according to different temporalities. He Fengming renders past events in the present in order to uncover and recognize the problem of the haunting past. Conversely, Dead Souls restores the symbolic separation between the past and the present, thus allowing the audience to face this part of history and engage in a critical reflection on the meaning of morality amid violence.