The faulty premise of linguistic homogeneity in LAA: the case of a Tibetan asylum seeker in Switzerland

Abstract In 2020, the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) unintentionally sent an origin report in its full form to the Tibetan asylum seeker concerned. This report reaches the conclusion that the subject “had very likely been socialised in a Tibetan exile community outside the People’s Republic of China” [my transl.] rather than in the region he claimed to have lived until little more than a year earlier, arguing that the observed “dialect mixture” and the existence of Lhasa Tibetan forms in the subject’s language is “inexplicable”. The present paper reiterates what Tibetologists around Camille Simon have argued ever since this report was brought to their attention: There is nothing unexpected about this dialect mixture, and it unequivocally supports the asylum seeker’s story. But despite appeals, the Federal Administrative Court in 2023 made a final decision confirming the validity of the reports and upholding the SEM’s rejection of the asylum application.