Gender Based Persecution - An Analysis
- IJLLR Journal
- 8 hours ago
- 1 min read
Manasa S, VIT School of Law
ABSTRACT
This article examines the failures of the international refugee protection system to recognize and redress gender persecution. A current legal framework based in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol does not explicitly contain gender as a ground for refugee status thus undermining claims based on rape, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and other forms of gender-specific persecution. The research is grounded in a doctrinal and comparative methodology focusing on main legal patterns, jurisdictional practices in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in the European Union and Australia and relevant jurisprudence in order to tackle the topic of the interpretative elasticity of the “particular social group” category. It also surveys procedural and evidentiary obstacles faced by women and LGBTQ+ refugee claimants such as credibility assessments and trauma-informed assessment. Using intersectional and feminist legal theory, this article critiques public/private split of refugee law and recommends substantive legal reform. It argues that gender should be formally recognized as a self- standing ground for persecution and urges, in the interests of a coherent interpretation, for context-sensitive adjudication practices which assemble around structural vulnerability and the lived experience, rather than around preconceived constructs about who is who – or whose excluded gender has to be controllable by the others to be recognized.
