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Summary
U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), ‘Refugee Laws Typically Work Against Women—These Examples Promise a Shift’, 2025
Abstract
Of the over 120 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, 43.4 million people are refugees and 6.9 million people are asylum seekers. Women make up around half of each population, yet they face refugee and asylum processes that are not operating with a gender-neutral approach.
Refugee and asylum eligibility is largely determined using the “refugee” definition from the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol (“Refugee Convention”), which defines a refugee as a person who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is . . . unwilling to return to it.” Countries that have signed onto the Refugee Convention have adopted close versions of this definition and have a duty not to expel (principle of non-refoulement) people who meet the definition.
But because gender is not listed as a ground for persecution, women have a difficult time showing that gender-related persecution warrants refugee protection. Most women seeking protection due to gender-related persecution, such as intimate partner violence, female genital mutilation (FGM), and forced marriage, must shape and adjust their claims to fit one of the other five persecution grounds—race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.
Yet, recent cases and procedural changes promise a shift. Short of adopting “gender” as a sixth ground of persecution, recent decisions in the European Union and New Zealand and guidelines in Canada have shown that barriers to gender-related refugee claims are being broken. This blog post surveys a few of the positive shifts seen in different refugee systems in deciding gender-related persecution claims.
