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Women’s Right to Asylum: Protecting the Rights of Female Asylum Seekers in Europe?

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Abstract

Criticisms have been made against international laws and conventions on asylum and refugees, arguing that these have been based on a male model of definition, which have ignored women’s persecutions. This article will argue that recent developments in European asylum policy have the potential to deepen this discrimination and to further reduce the rights of female asylum seekers. Although there have been some positive developments in jurisprudence that have recognised that gender-specific persecution may be the basis for granting asylum, these advances remain relatively sporadic and are undermined by the operation of random and discretionary exercises of power by bureaucrats and decision makers in many cases. Further, although new developments in asylum policy are in theory “gender neutral,” differences in the material circumstances of men and women who arrive to seek asylum may mean in effect that the implications of these policies are deeply gendered.

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Notes

  1. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the Geneva Convention), as well as its protocol of 1967, is the international convention that underpins the currently existing refugee and asylum regimes in most countries of the world.

  2. These estimates have, however, been criticised for being based on the figures for women and children. The amalgamation of these two categories has been used to highlight the problem of the neglect of women refugees, but this use of ‘women and children’ as a category can act to reinforce essentialised representations of women as helpless victims (Enloe 2000; Carpenter 2005).

  3. For a more detailed discussion of this distinction, see Macklin 1995.

  4. Interview with author, September 2005.

  5. Crawley and Lester (2004) reported that requests to be interviewed by someone of the same sex were usually granted in less than half of the countries they studied, whilst in only a quarter of these countries was a same-sex interpreter regularly provided.

  6. Interviews 2005 and 2006.

  7. Interview March 2006.

  8. www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/ind/en/home/law_policy/policy_instructions/gender_issues_in_the.html

  9. Interviews with author, January and February 2007.

  10. Interview with author, December 2006.

  11. Interview with author, November 2006.

  12. It is apparently common knowledge that the French-speaking section of the CGRA is much more likely to make positive judgements in asylum cases than their Flemish-speaking counterparts, leading to very similar cases receiving different judgements from the two different sections.

  13. Interview with author, December 2006.

  14. Council of the European Union, ‘Amended Proposal for a Council Directive on Minimum Standards on Procedures in Member States for Granting and Withdrawing Refugee Status.’

  15. Interview with author, October 2005.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chaire Marie Curie, Centre de Recherches Politiques de la Sorbonne, Universite de Paris 1 –Pantheon Sorbonne, 14 Rue Cujas, 75005, Paris, France

    Jane Freedman

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Correspondence to Jane Freedman.

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Freedman, J. Women’s Right to Asylum: Protecting the Rights of Female Asylum Seekers in Europe?. Hum Rights Rev 9, 413–433 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-008-0059-1

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