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How the UK Asylum System Is Failing the Non-Religious with Dr. Lucy Potter

• Humanise Live • Season 1 • Episode 9

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This week's guest is Dr. Lucy Potter, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of York. Her landmark three-year study — Freedom of Religion or Belief for All: Recognising and Protecting the Non-Religious in the Asylum System — reveals how the UK's asylum system routinely misunderstands and fails people fleeing persecution for leaving their religion. Lucy shares her key findings, her policy recommendations to the Home Office, and how she has been taking this research to Parliament and the UN.

In this episode we cover

  • The UN Committee on NGOs — why the newly elected slate of states is alarming for civil society
  • The crisis in the Middle East and the erosion of the rules-based international order
  • What drew Dr. Lucy Potter to research non-religious asylum claims
  • Why the asylum system struggles to assess non-religious identity claims
  • Key recommendations — updated Home Office policy, staff training, and adjusting the burden of proof

References

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🎶Music: Horizon by Simon Folwar

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

Welcome And What’s Ahead

Leon Langdon

Welcome to Freedom of Thought, a podcast by Humanist International. With me, Leon Langdon. And me, Gary McClellan. Each week we'll be discussing news, research, policy developments, and campaigns related to freedom of thought around the world. And this week, and shortly, you'll hear our interview with Dr. Lucy Potter, who's doing research on non-religious asylum claims in the UK. And we have a great and wide-ranging chat about the international landscape of it and recommendations for policymakers. And I think that's really exciting. Gary, meanwhile, you've been in Canada for the last couple of days, if I'm not mistaken.

Gary McLelland

That's right. Last week I was in Montreal and Ottawa for a few days. I was a meeting with Janilee Morris, who's the executive director of Humanist Canada, who I think we'll be speaking to very soon on the podcast, Leon. We were just at the hotel, the Weston Hotel in Ottawa, putting together some final preparations for the World Humanist Congress, which kicks off in just about five months' time. In addition to that, I went over to Montreal to meet with the Humanist Association of Quebec, the French-speaking part in Canada, to talk to them and encourage them to come along

Canada Trip And Congress Plans

Gary McLelland

to the World Humanist Congress as well. And today I'm actually in Guatemala. I'll I'm here primarily for a holiday, but whilst I'm here, I'm also doing some work. I'll be meeting with Humanistas Guatemala and David Panida, our former board member, and doing some other work here while I'm in Guatemala. What about you, Leon?

Leon Langdon

How have you been? What have you been working on? I've been doing a lot less with my language skills than you, I would imagine, given your English, French, and Spanish visits lately. It's been a busy week. Human Rights Council is officially finished, which is uh a brief reprieve until the next one and some exciting movement on a couple of things. We had the new EU special envoy on freedom of religion or belief outside of the European Union appointed, McGuinness, who we have a working relationship with from years gone by. Within our sort of you know, welcoming of her to the position, we also took the opportunity obviously to reiterate our consistent issues with that position, which people can read about in more detail on our website where we've done a lot of work on it, but major issues around transparency with that appointment that we're dealing with behind the scenes, among other things, in terms of the positioning of the mandate and some other stuff. More recently, though, at the UN, and some worrying news is the EcoSoc member states voted to pick the 19 members of the Committee on NGOs for a four-year term starting in 2027. So this committee is one that basically gets oversight over civil society, so non-governmental organizations at the UN. In an almost entirely uncompetitive vote, they elected mostly states with really terrible records on civil society repression, which is really, really worrying. We've also fallen foul of this committee before, due to how our website had previously referred to Taiwan, simply as Taiwan rather than Taiwan province of China. Um and we actually had our accreditation deferred temporarily, thankfully, but some really worrying developments there in New York.

Gary McLelland

Yeah, that is a real big concern. And I guess that this committee has some real power and influence over particularly NGO participation at the UN, like you just mentioned. So I think it's definitely something to be very concerned about.

Leon Langdon

I think one of the problems as well is the UN by its nature is, and it's something we've talked about in terms of the need to reform, but to reform, one of the issues is that it is opaque, not very transparent, and most people have never even heard of this committee.

UN Appointments And NGO Oversight

Leon Langdon

And now you have countries serving on it for another four years who are honestly a majority repressive or have repressive records when it comes to civil society across every regional slate, which is really incredibly worrying, and we'll be watching that pretty closely. Of course, something else we're watching this week is everything going on in the Middle East. Obviously, Iran is a focal point, but I think to even call it just simply in Iran is a misnomer given the the regional spread of things.

Gary McLelland

We were absolutely horrified to see some of the pronouncements from President Trump over the last few days essentially threatening what seems to me Premier Fasia genocide against the people in Iran. What have you been making of developments?

Leon Langdon

Yeah, I think so many people were saying, Oh, it's overblown, you can't trust what he's saying, it's bluff, things like that. And on one hand, I'll point out that that seems to have been true, but on the other hand, the fact that we have to make these allowances for someone who holds one of the world's, if not the world's largest nuclear arsenal, who holds the army that he does, the background that he does, I think there are excuses that we have to take that stuff seriously. If another person with power and influence and the ability to actually commit, you know, genocide or war crimes was threatening them, we would be looking at assessing them under some sort of law of incitement or some sort of legal criminal regime. But that doesn't seem to be the case here. And as always, I think our concern is just with the people of Iran, like the people who okay, they weren't, what is it, bombed back to the Stone Age on Tuesday evening. But you know, if that threat still looms, meanwhile, Israel continue to bomb Southern Lebanon. The people who are being heard are around the Middle East and they're dying in their tens of dozens on a daily basis right now.

Gary McLelland

Yeah.

Leon Langdon

It's just a simply tragic situation.

Gary McLelland

And it's difficult to see when a state such as the US, who's been for so long one of the major pillars of the international rules-based system, it's difficult to see how they could then be held accountable by it. I guess we are really an uncharted territory now with the rules-based system.

Leon Langdon

I think so much of the concern as well is around oil and the Strait of Hormuz, which is all incredibly legitimate on one hand, to do with the cost of living going off, people not being able to heat their homes across the world, people not being able to travel for emergencies and things like that. But I think ultimately that is secondary to the death and destruction being wreaked on a frankly daily basis at this point, and seeing what the next two weeks look like will be. I don't want to use the word interesting, but I think it it's a moment of held breath, baited breath for a lot of us in the sort of International Human Rights Committee who feel quite powerless in all this, as you point to. Yeah.

Gary McLelland

Well, I guess in this week's podcast, we can at least hopefully have some good news to share. So we have an interview with Dr. Lucy Potter, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of York. She recently published a landmark study called Freedom of Religion or Belief for All: recognizing and protecting the non-religious in the asylum system, based on three years of research into how the UK asylum system treats people fleeing persecution for leaving their religion. Her findings reveal a troubling pattern. Non-religious asylum seekers are routinely misunderstood and failed by a system. We're delighted to welcome Dr. Potter to share more about her findings and recommendations. Lucy, welcome to Freedom of Thought.

Dr Lucy Potter

Thank you for the invitation, Gary and Leon.

Gary McLelland

So I guess, Lucy, it'd be good to start maybe just with a bit of an idea of what it is that drew you to this area of research and what inspired you or motivated you to start your research in this area.

Middle East Fears And Accountability

Dr Lucy Potter

Yeah, thank you for the question. This research came about in 2018. So a Pakistani humanist and former Muslim was denied asylum in the UK because the Home Office didn't consider him to be a genuine humanist. And the reasons given for his rejection was that he couldn't name ancient Greek philosophers who supposedly held humanist beliefs. And the Home Office had referred to Plato and Aristotle here, which was ironic because they were actually religious. And so this case demonstrated that there was really significant misunderstandings in how the Home Office understands humanist beliefs, but not only humanists, non-religious worldviews more widely, and then wouldn't know how to assess their claims when it comes to asylum. And this is obviously really important because non-religious people are at risk globally of persecution and asylum protections need to be put in place for their identity specifically. And I was also drawn to do the research originally because there was actually no empirical research at the start. So there weren't many papers or studies at all on this topic, and it felt really important to do. And then from an academic background, I came from philosophy and then went into sociology and I've always been interested in kind of power dynamics, religious beliefs, and then as well as non-religious. And I thought when I saw this project, I thought it was perfect for me to do.

Leon Langdon

And Lucy, then what were the core findings of the three years of research?

Dr Lucy Potter

The research found two major issues with the British asylum system. Okay, so the first being that the whole system itself was poorly equipped to assess non-religious based claims. And then the second being that non-religious refugees are facing very distinct barriers to gain and protection in the system. And I found that these problems largely stemmed from gaps in policies offered by the Home Office that didn't clearly define non-religious identities, didn't clearly explain what it means to be persecuted for being non-religious and misunderstanding actually the risk that apostates face globally. And I can go into a bit more detail about them if you would like me to.

Gary McLelland

I think that would be interesting. I mean, thinking back to you mentioned about this person who was asked to prove that he was a humanist by quoting ancient philosophers and things like that. I suppose it is just an interesting thing to reflect on that I suppose humanist beliefs in that sense are sort of non-doctrinal in our traditional religious sense. And it's not as if we have a creed or some sort of statement of principles that uh in a kind of dogmatic sense that people can be asked to verify. I suppose what was that difference in belief and in the kind of category of belief, maybe? Was that a challenge for you in your research?

Dr Lucy Potter

Yeah, so what I found was that the home office understands religious persecution as religious. And so you can see that you can understand that most of the claims that they get in under religious-based asylum claims are to do with religion. And so you can understand that most of their policies would be orientated around religion. When you get someone who's non-religious and has maybe an absence of a religion, it's really hard to demonstrate and prove their identity, especially when they're being assessed in the same frameworks that are orientated around religion. For example, the policies talk about a lot about religious conversion cases. They talk about groups, religious minority

Why Study Non-Religious Asylum

Dr Lucy Potter

groups. And so when they're assessing their claims in practice in the interview, they're often assessed on things like their knowledge of those particular groups or conversions, whether they participate in church now or go to the mosque, for example, to supply evidence like baptism certificates and so to materialize their claims in particular ways. But if you are non-religious or having left a religion, you don't usually have these same markers of evidence that religious people can show. So the problems for non-religious people are quite distinct because, yeah, there aren't universal rituals that non-religious people will all take part in to prove their identity.

Leon Langdon

And you said at the beginning of your research there was a big gap in the literature on this. Is would you say that's generally on non-religious views or on the rights of non-religious people? I know I've found that sometimes it is hard to get empirical studies. We see a lot more kind of sources from organizations actually like ours, more so than peer-reviewed research on that.

Dr Lucy Potter

Yeah, so my research is placed in the broader academic literature that looks at religion-based asylum claims. So when I first started researching it, you can see quite a few studies that are about religious conversion. And these are most commonly understood from people who've left the Islamic faith and become Christian. Now, that also tends to be in more of a European context, so less so in the UK. And then you also have the other literature that looks at international law. So there are quite a few legal and doctrinal studies on non-religious rights more generally. So how they fit within freedom of religion or belief. There's particular studies that look at how non-religious rights are upheld in like the US, for example. And for example, like in the UK, with state schools prioritizing, for example, religious beliefs when they're oversubscribed. So you have these bits of research. But in terms of applying for so freedom of religion or belief and non-religious rights in asylum, that there wasn't any when I first started. This has slowly begun to change. So there's one book that's really good that's about non-religious asylum in a European context. I think Sweden, Switzerland, and Norway. And except for that, obviously, my research, but yeah, it's quite slow on the uptake. And I'm not sure why. I wonder if it's because I'm in sociology and they have so sociology of religion is historically focused on like religious reliefs because of the founding partners of sociology and so on. And so, yeah, we're we're lagging behind in terms of looking at non-religion, especially in asylum contexts. So that's what I try to focus on.

Gary McLelland

It's really interesting. I guess one of the things that we at Humanists International advocate on is promoting the fact that international human rights law protects humanists, atheists, non-religious people from discrimination the same way it treats protects any other

How Credibility Tests Go Wrong

Gary McLelland

religious person. But I suppose what we're looking here at is the intersection between that legal right, with that the fact of that legal right, and how presumably people at the Home Office or other public officials have to enforce that. So obviously your research is completely at that intersection there of where this becomes a reality for people. I guess based on your substantial research, do you have any sort of key recommendations that you would make for people involved in this system about how we can improve it?

Dr Lucy Potter

Yes. So after I wrote my thesis, and as part of the fellowship that I have now at the University of York, so I've wrote a report that is much more accessible to read than my thesis. It's got the clear empirical findings of the barriers that non-religious people face when claiming asylum. And then I also put forward a series of recommendations for policy aimed at the Home Office to implement. The first being that we would like them to update the current policies that they have now. So, for example, they have a policy called assessing credibility, and that is guidance on how to assess someone's genuine credibility of a particular claim. There isn't much information in there about how to assess the credibility of someone who has a non-religious belief, and which we said is a problem because it's really difficult to prove in absence of something. Then in conducting, they have a document called conducting asylum interviews, and in that they break down the particular grounds of the refugee convention with advice on how to ask questions about those particular grounds. It does mention religion or belief in that document, and it does acknowledge that non-religious beliefs are not codified in the same way as religious conversion, and so shouldn't be asked in the same way. However, my research found that in practice this wasn't followed, and that non-religious people are being quizzed through knowledge-based questioning and like trivia-based questionings, like we've said about the philosophers. And I think this is because there isn't a policy on its own that recognizes how to assess non-religious claims. So, for example, there is particular documents for specific countries that have information on how to assess claims for religious conversion or religious minorities. And so my research calls on the Home Office to create a similar document that is specifically dealing with the non-religious. And we really think they should be separated out from broader claims of apostasy because it needs to be recognized because after they've acknowledged themselves, they are codified differently. And so, within these documents, they do need to include

Policy Fixes For Fair Decisions

Dr Lucy Potter

more information about what it means to be non-religious. So when they do say that it can be religion or belief, it doesn't then go on to say humanist. I think in two of the documents they might refer to atheists, but again, that's a really narrow identity that doesn't sometimes actually translate across other contexts. And so, yes, we want to call on the home office to update current policies, but also create a new policy that specifically recognises the non-religious. And then following that, a call on the home office to implement staff training on the updated policies. We do believe there is some sort of freedom of religion or belief training at the Home Office, but we don't know how adequate that is for non-religion. And when I was conducting my research, it wasn't clear whether this was having an effect on the ground on how asylum claims are being dealt with. And so we would really like to be involved with shaping the training. And for example, Humanist UK have done this before previously a few years back, and we'd really value being invited back to implement this training again and to make sure that it's fully inclusive of the non-religious. Another recommendation would be to adjust the burden of proof. So, like we said, when you're in your asylum claim, you tend to have to provide objective evidence for your claim. If people aren't able to submit evidence, it's really hard for the Home Office to assess their claim positively. And currently, the burden of proof in the UK is really quite high and very difficult for applicants to demonstrate. So when non-religious people can't produce public document documentation of their beliefs, and this needs to be taken into the Home Office. That doesn't always suggest a lack of credibility. It's actually just very difficult to evidence these particular beliefs. And so, yes, these are just some of the recommendations that we have. And then we think they'll be relatively easy to implement. It's just that the Home Office needs to have better awareness of the challenges that non-religious people face and then being able to implement these changes in practice.

Leon Langdon

And what sort of avenues have you been going down? So you've turned the initial research into this subsequent policy recommendations. Have you been able to work, I believe, through UK Parliament and also speak to the UN about some of this, if I'm not mistaken?

Dr Lucy Potter

Yeah, the main thing that I've done recently was the report and the policy recommendations. As part of that, I produced a policy brief that I sent to parliamentarians. The report was obviously I work closely with Humanist UK into communicating the findings to a wider audience. And for

Parliament And UN Advocacy Routes

Dr Lucy Potter

example, they invited me to do an oral intervention at the UN's Human Rights Council, and I was able to draw on the research to call on the closing of the gaps in asylum assessment processes. I also can use the research then to provide a response to consultations that are being called. For example, quite recently, the special rapporteur on Forbes put out a call for evidence, and my research was put into that response. And then, yeah, in the UK, so it was a really exciting opportunity that I spoke in parliament at the all-party parliamentary humanist group. And then in that particular meeting, I called on my research to highlight the harms of blasphemy laws and to call for the global reform of them. So trying to bridge the gap between academic research to groups that have more opportunity to have kind of an on-the-ground impact. And I think groups like Humanist International and Humanist UK, and then working with the all-party parliamentary groups, have been really useful in trying to translate these complex, often theoretical problems into more actionable policy responses.

Gary McLelland

Thanks, Lucy. Thinking internationally, are you aware of how the UK compares to other countries? And are there, for example, other countries around the world that you're aware of that are able to do this system a bit better?

Dr Lucy Potter

My research focus was on the UK. And so that's where my expertise lies. But when I was conducting the research, there were similar findings across asylum systems. So in terms of proving credibility and the challenges of evidencing an identity that perhaps is an internally held belief and an internal conviction, much of the problems with those types of claims are common

How The UK Compares Abroad

Dr Lucy Potter

across the global north. So asylum systems, you know, across the UK, across your US, their refugee protection regimes are increasingly restrictive. And there's lots of research out there to say they that claims are dealt with skepticism and disbelief instead of being dealt with from like a criminal standpoint innocent until proven guilty. Claimants are treated as they are not genuine. And so that's a problem across the whole of the global north and is a particular problem for all sorts of belief based claims, so not just non religious sexuality based claims, for example. Then the specific problems that are distinct for non religious claims are also not unique to the UK. It's quite common across most asylum systems, especially in Europe, that they were built to deal with religious persecution. So, again, policies and practices are more commonly drawn from assessing religious persecution, religious conversion, and minority space. And so more recently we do know that systems are evolving. So there has, so in terms of the academic research, there has been growing recognition that non-religion is a grounds for asylum, that it needs to be protected, and more people are starting to research it. More European countries have started to invest more seriously in freedom of religion or belief training for decision makers. So actually, at the outset of the research, when the UK had initially put this forb training in place after the case that that claimant was asked about humanist belief systems, this forbid training was put in place. And actually, the UK was pioneering in it. And this is what the human rights advocates I interviewed as part of this research told me is that the UK was leading in this forbid training. And actually, other countries had been in touch with the Home Office and wanting to know more about their forbid training and how they could implement it in their context. But on the whole, I guess it is quite slow, and non-religious people aren't being recognized enough in these processes. And so I really want to keep the momentum up with to acknowledge non-religious rights across asylum systems in the UK and Europe.

Leon Langdon

Thanks, Lucy. Yeah, I think that call for more training on freedom of religion or belief generally, but also freedom of religion or belief for all in all its nuances for decision makers in asylum processes, but also diplomats generally, anyone who's involved in government and foreign relations, even on the domestic side, actually, I think it's really important. I know it's something that we at Humanist International have had the privilege of doing or supporting our members and doing in enough contexts at this point, but something that I think can always be there can always be more of it, let's say. I think that's all we have time for, Lucy. But thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. We really appreciate not only your time today, but also the research that you're doing. Very excited to see more from you and to keep working and supporting that as we can.

Dr Lucy Potter

Thank you.

Leon Langdon

Thanks, Lucy.

Gary McLelland

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