Confession, death and disbelief: interrogating the asylum cases of the Court of Justice of the European Union

This article addresses the connections between confession, truth and death that materialise in asylum processes and the European Union’s asylum system more generally. Through close-reading of two asylum cases from the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), on the one hand, and an analysis of Michel Foucault’s works related to confession, on the other hand, I demonstrate how asylum processes follow a logic that can be described as confessional in light of Foucault’s work. At the same time, this analysis illustrates how not only are the notions of confession and death interlinked in Foucault’s work, but also how these notions share the same root in suspicion towards the self and others. This theoretical contribution is then used to further elaborate how the workings of the EU’s asylum procedures can be analysed through a truth–confession–death triad that is rooted in suspicion and disbelief. Finally, I suggest that the operation of the EU’s asylum procedures can be understood as a confessional dispositive, an economy of power that follows a confessional logic.