On Thursday 23 September the first ACMRL research seminar of the new year was held. In this seminar, attended by students of the IMRL-program and ACMRL-staff, Betty de Hart gave a presentation entitled: 

Love, sex, faith. The politics of emotion in migration control

How to decide whether a couple is genuinely in love, or whether a person is gay or truly believes in Jesus? How can one objectively determine such a subjective issue as human emotions? This is the dilemma that those involved in immigration procedures face on a daily basis. Immigration officers have to determine the genuineness of emotions in cases of suspected of marriages of convenience in family migration law, as well as in applications based on sexual orientation and religious conversion in asylum law. In this talk, Betty de Hart focussed on marriages of convenience in EU law and how the notion of marriages of convenience affect family migration policies.