A refugee who escaped armed captors in Myanmar was interrogated at an Australian tribunal hearing into her protection claim about why she used the toilet before fleeing soldiers.
The incident was described by University of Technology Sydney law academic Anthea Vogl in her new book, Judging Refugees, published on Monday, which argues oral hearings put refugees on the back foot by expecting them to provide perfect and coherent testimonies.
"A very significant majority of refugee status determination decisions are not about the content of the claim, but they turn on the credibility of the applicants," Dr Vogl told AAP.
She said the extended "interrogation" of the woman from Myanmar of why she would go to the toilet before she escaped was a sticking factor for the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) decision-maker who was critical of her credibility as a genuine refugee.
"The key finding of the book is that even though the law doesn't require refugees to be able to shape the evidence into a good story, so something that has a really clear, beginning, middle and an end ... that's the kind of standard that refugee testimony is being held to."
The tribunal is a semi-independent oversight body that hears everything from asylum claims to welfare payments and reviews government decisions.
Legislation introduced by the Albanese government in March is paving the way for a new review tribunal after the AAT came under withering criticism for intractable delays and nepotism under the coalition government.
Dr Vogl said the reforms would result in significant improvements to the tribunal thanks to a more transparent appointment process.
They also removed the Immigration Assessment Authority, which the academic described as "an extremely unfair and fast-tracked hearing process exclusively for refugees who arrived by boat".
She cautioned that the refugee determination process remained problematic because of credibility assessments Dr Vogl said were based on unreasonable expectations and biases from decision-makers.
Running at almost 200 pages, Dr Vogl's book published by Cambridge University Press likened the closed oral AAT hearings to a "black box".
"In that one-on-one hearing between a decision-maker and a refugee applicant, we really don't know what goes on," she said.
"The absolute pressure on refugees to tell a good story and one that really conforms with Anglo-European understandings of narration and storytelling are completely at odds with the way in which refugees experience their past and the events that have happened to them."
She said the hearings did not take into account the complexity of how refugees sought asylum, and decision-makers tended to impose their expectations of how refugees behaved without a full understanding of the circumstances.
The human element of how hearings were conducted, which differed from one tribunal member to the next, also affected the outcomes of whether a refugee was successful in being granted protection.
Dr Vogl said many hearings operated in an adversarial manner that could be connected to a larger "culture of disbelief and doubt" around the genuine nature of asylum seekers.
"This culture of denial is very much a direct consequence of the political context which casts refugees as queue jumpers, as bogus and as dishonest," she said.
