ABSTRACT
Like all legal rules, the refugee definition has been drafted in the male form. According to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees l (hereafter: the Refugee Convention), a refugee is any person who "owing to a 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 avail himself of the protection of that country" (Article 1 A (2) Refugee Convention). The conference at which the Refugee Convention was drafted discussed the relevance of gender once. Article 3 stipulates that the Convention shall be applied "without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin". The Yugoslav delegate proposed that the words "or sex" sh ould be added. This suggestion was rejected because, in the words of the British delegate, "the equality of the sexes was a matter for national legislation".2 The inclusion of sex as a forbidden discrimination ground might have led to conflicts with national legislation: "To quote an example, during a tobacco shortage in Austria the ration for women had been smaller than that for men. It had been alleged in the constitutional courts that that was a violation of the equality of the sexes, but the finding of the courts had been that women needed less tobacco than men".3 In light of this smoky atmosphere, it is remarkable that the possibility of persecution on acount of gender was mentioned, be it only in passing. The Chairman of the Conference, the UN High Commisioner for Refugees Van Heuven Goedhart, believed "the original idea underlying article 3 to be that persons who had been persecuted on account of their race or religion, for example, should not be exposed to the same danger in the country of asylum. He doubted strongly whether there would be any cases of persecution on account of sex".4 It would last three decades until the next reference to persecution on account of gender was made.
