Gender Based Persecution as a Basis for Asylum: An Annotated Bibliography

The author notes that asylum has been extended in United States law to include some gender-based treatment, such as female genital mutilation (FGM), viewed as a type of persecution. The author points out that despite references to international norms suggesting what constitutes a refugee and the criteria of a "well-founded fear of persecution," US law has not moved beyond FGM to view general gender-based persecution as a ground for asylum. The author suggests that even this basis for asylum arose when American society "found it so outrageous as to criminalize it domestically." This extensive bibliography is itself a collection of annotations of recent literature from American and English secondary sources concerning the direction of US legislation and asylum case-law. [Descriptors: Migration - Refugees and Immigration, International - North America]