ABSTRACT
Court decisions on female asylum applicants are not a new phenomenon. In May 1955, a Polish woman who had lost her original Dutch nationality when she married a Polish citizen in 1940 sought asylum in The Netherlands. The woman, Maria Toet, argued that she did not agree with the regime in Poland and that her marriage was a very bad one as her husband drank heavily and abused her. The Minister of Justice stated that no sufficient grounds were put forward to grant political asylum, and that "the personal grounds that were put forward are subject to doubt, because they were mentioned only after six weeks and it had appeared in the meanwhile that the applicant had taken up a relationship with the husband of a deceased sister of hers". The District Court did not decide on the substance of the case because it found the case outside its jurisdiction. l
In the present chapter, the construction of the female applicant in jurisprudence is analysed? The overview is exhaustive with respect to published Dutch case law. The overview of cases from other jurisdictions has been based on literature, with additional research in a limited number of sources.3 Other case law is only mentioned when it provides a substantively different picture than Dutch case law; the references to the other non-Dutch cases are presented in the footnotes. The present overview of case law on women and refugee status is - to my knowledge - the most comprehensive up to date although it is still not exhaustive. The aim of this chapter is to identify the patterns of argumentation in cases concerning female asylum applicants. The aim is not to analyse each decision as to its doctrinal merits; such an analysis would exceed the scope of the present study.
