Conveyor-Belt Justice: Precarity, Access to Justice and Geographies of Legal Aid in Asylum Appeals

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no-choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three-year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.The authors would like to thank the researchers involved throughout various stages of the project, in no specific order: Melanie Griffiths, Rebecca Rotter, Jennifer Allsopp, and Natalia Paszkiewicz. We acknowledge useful comments from Emma Marshall on an earlier draft. This research has been funded by the ESRC (ES/J023426/1)