Medical certificates have long occupied a central place in critical scholarship on asylum adjudication. In this literature, they are often understood as authoritative forms of evidence of past suffering and persecution, or of risks of future deprivation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in German first-instance administrative courts, this paper revisits the role of the medical certificate by shifting analytical attention from medical experts and humanitarian organizations to asylum judges. The empirical context is a series of appeals concerning refugees previously granted protection in Greece, following a landmark ruling by the German Federal Administrative Court that deemed return reasonable for young, single, non-vulnerable men. 

In this paper, I examine how the evidentiary value of medical certificates is relationally produced within judges’ knowledge practices. I show, first, how the legal significance of certificates is shaped by procedural arrangements, particularly a statutory presumption that health-related obstacles to deportation do not exist unless substantiated through a legally compliant medical certificate. Yet judges do not approach this presumption merely as a technical rule. They interpret certificates and the law governing them as socio-political artefacts, shaped by broader concerns about migration control, access to healthcare, and the practical constraints faced by asylum seekers.

Second, I explore how certificates acquire meaning and evidentiary value in relation to the oral hearing. While medical documents provide formal support for legally defensible judgments, judges also draw on their own ‘everyday theories’ of sickness and vulnerability when assessing testimonies. The certificate, I suggest, works as a hinge through which different forms of knowledge are brought into relation.

Speaker: Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland (University of Bergen)