INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REFUGEE LAW

This article examines the development of Australian jurisprudence on refugee claims of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered and HIV-positive individuals. The article contains detailed discussion of international refugee law and the characterization of homosexuality as a particular social group under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The article also includes comparisons with jurisprudence from other countries including Canada, the US, and the UK. The second part of the article discusses the assessment of persecution for these groups by the courts.

The article addresses the barriers facing women refugees claiming asylum in Western states and discusses the role that power and patriarchy play in constructing these barriers. The author begins with a brief background of the contemporary Australian policy on refugees. She then moves to a discussion of the specific experiences of women refugees and identifies where international law and the Australian system fail to protect the specific vulnerabilities of women.

This article explores the interaction between gender and international refugee law. The author shows how gender has historically not been considered in assessing refugee claims and then demonstrates the evolution towards modern refugee law, which incorporates gender considerations. While generally supportive of this shift, the author argues that current approaches to assessing gender-based refugee claims fragment the identity of refugee claimants and separate a womans gender from other aspects of her personality, including race, nationality, and religious identity.

This article focuses on the specific language in the Swedish Aliens Act which uses the term "persecution on account of sex" as opposed to the more common "gender-related persecution". This linguistic difference poses foreseeable problems and ambiguities which ultimately lead to questions of defining the particular range of the provision and whether it leads to discriminatory exclusion from other protection categories.

The call for countries to adopt consistent standards for admission of women fleeing gender-related persecution was largely based on the experience of Canada and, more recently, the United States in formulating guidelines for refugee decision-makers. This article briefly outlines the background to the adoption of the Guidelines on Women Refugee Claimants Fearing Gender-Related Persecution issued by Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board in 1993.

The Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board Guidelines on Women Refugee Claimants Fearing Gender-Related Persecution represent an important and innovative development for refugee law generally and for the law relating to gender-related persecution in particular. This article discusses the general process of forming the guidelines in relation to Canada's Immigration Act.

This paper examines the grounds for obtaining refugee status, the main problems faced by women, and discrimination as a protection concern. Although the 'social group' component can be advanced to include many women as refugees under the 1951 Convention, it does not address the core issue of discrimination on grounds of sex as a violation of fundamental rights, or the problems of violence specifically directed against women.

Feminist critiques of the Convention refugee definition have called for the addition of gender as a prohibited ground of persecution. However, the inclusion of gender as such a ground assumes consensus on the nature of gender-based persecution. This article takes issue with recent writing on gender-based persecution, particularly the relationship between women and the State.

This article assesses two United States cases which consider whether rape could qualify as persecution on the basis of political opinion: Sofia Campos-Guardado v Immigration and Naturalization Service and Olympia Lazo-Majano v Immigration and Naturalization Service. The article discusses under what conditions rape, or threats of rape, should constitute persecution warranting protection within the meaning of the Convention definition of refugee and how such claims could best be framed in the Canadian context.

This article begins with a review of the historical development of Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) guidelines on gender-related persecution which were adopted in 1993. The author discusses the rationale behind the adoption of the guidelines, namely the recognition that many women are persecuted solely on the basis of their sex. The author explains how the IRB implemented the guidelines and how the Canadian courts have interpreted and endorsed the guidelines, such that gender is now considered as a basis of "particular social group" for the purposes of the 1951 Refugee Convention.