Justice under Threat: Terrorist Attacks and Asylum Adjudication

Abstract

We investigate whether Islamist terrorist attacks on domestic soil affect asylum adjudication. Focusing on Belgium, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of Islamist attacks relative to appeals before the Council for Alien Law Litigation (CALL). Analyzing all Dutch-language CALL verdicts from 2007 to 2020, and combining detailed case- and judge-level data with text-as-data measures of case content, we find no evidence of a generalized post-attack tightening of asylum decisions. Following Islamist attacks, the probability of granting protection declines only in cases with salient references to the Islamic State, particularly for male applicants from Muslim-majority countries and, notably, for verdicts delivered by experienced female judges. These effects dissipate over time, and no similar effects appear after non-Islamist attacks. Overall, our findings are inconsistent with generalized threat, emotion-based, and ingroup-bias accounts, suggesting instead that terrorism shocks influence legal institutions through temporary, context-dependent shifts in judges' evaluation of salient security-related case cues.