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Chapter 1 Introduction The Sex Persecution Canlpaigns The immigration officer came inside. He said: "Madame, when was the last letter you got from your husband? ... Your lawyer, she talks about a letter that was written to you about a ('wedding dress.' What does it mean?" I said "Oh. This means that . .. ifI don't stay here in Canada I have to go back with a wedding dress. But in our culture, when we die we dress in white. I am already married to him, why do I have to bring a wedding dress? This is it: for me to die in." - Therese, refugee claimant, 1995 When I was in Saudi Arabia, I thought that women in other countries were more respected and more powerful. I was naive. I first realized my naivete when they laughed at me at the airport when I said I have problems because I am a woman. -Nada, refugee claimant, 1993 The persecution ofwomen is irrelevant to the refugee status determination process. -Randy Gordan, assistant to Imrnigration Minister Bernard Valcourt, 1992 I don't think Canada should unilaterally try to impose its values [on women's rights] on the rest ofthe world. Canada cannotgo it alone, we just cannot. -Bernard Valcourt, Canadian itnmigration minister, responding to demands to make refugee policy gender inclusive, 1993 Therese's and Nada's experiences are both typical and atypical for asylum seekers. All asylum seekers experience life in the balance as their eligibility for international protection as "refugees" is judged. Indeed, as one eminent refugee scholar captured so vividly, when it comes to issues of 2 Chapter 1 refugee recognition "the definitional problem ... is not mere academic exercise but has bearing on matters of life and death" (Zolberg et al. 1989:3). Also typical is the "burden of proof" which inland asylum seekers bear (Schenk 1996). That is, far from being a simple process of doling out aid to victims, refugee determinations are organized in adversarial court settings in which individuals make claims, are questioned by officials, and must provide evidence that they have been persecuted. Their claims are then judged under national law as well as international standards and foreign policy considerations (Teitelbaum 1984). The atypical nature of Therese's and Nada's experiences , and asylum seekers like them, emerges in the explicitly politicized and very public nature of their claim making. They made claims at the time considered illegitimate, shared their personal stories of persecution with the mass media, and became the center point of campaigns to change refugee policy. Their actions in the early 1990S cast a spotlight on a previously invisible refugee movement, making national and international headlines and raising intense debates about the universality of women's rights. These women were seeking asylum from female-specific forms and causes of violence, and challenging historically gender-biased frameworks to get it. Their claims illuminated culturally relativist and sexist assumptions underlying the international human rights norms upon which refugee policy is based. In so doing, they not only triggered a radical shift in refugee policy worldwide, but facilitated an expansion of human rights as internationally understood. Canada, where Therese, Nada, and dozens of other asylum seekers campaigned , became the first country to address women's rights to protection from female-specific violence as an interstate responsibility when it instated policy enabling asylum on what were then novel human rights grounds. Its March 1993 Guidelines on Women Refugee Claimants Fearing GenderRelated Persecution explicitly recognized violence against women as a serious structural human rights abuse and thus amounting to persecution, and laid out a detailed approach to incorporate such abuse within the five existing categories ofpersecution under international refugee law-race, religion, nationality , political opinion, and membership in a social group (1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). That is, human rights violations may occur due to the gender-specific treatment ofwomen (e.g., domestic and sexual violence, persecutory gender customs and criminal codes), and for the purpose of refugee law this can be identified within particular races, religions ' nationalities, political opinions, and social groups. Within a few years, Introduction 3 the United Nations High Commission on the Status of Refugees, the European Union, and a growing number of states were following Canada's lead (UNHCR 2003). Very little is known about this novel refugee movement, and even less about how it actually succeeded in making sex persecution matter. Policy outcomes have been treated primarily in a positivist manner, ignoring how and why they came to be and...

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