ABSTRACT
Legal protection for refugees, enshrined in international, regional and domestic law as the exception to a sovereign’s right to exclude non-citizens from unauthorized entry, has greatly diminished under the policies of the securitization of migration. This chapter begins by setting out the international refugee protection legal framework, and a gendered analysis of refugee protection. The legal struggles faced by women in having their claims of gender-specific or gender-related persecution accepted by courts or tribunals in the Global North is the focus of the majority of scholarship on gender and refugee protection. In the main, this research has relied on documentary analysis of secondary sources, often court documents (Macklin 1998, 1995; Haines 2001; Hunter 2002; Sinha 2001; Bacon and Booth 2000; Kneebone 2005; Pickering 2005, 2011). Empirical studies of women’s experiences of other stages of the refugee experience, outside the courtroom, have been minimal. This area is gradually gaining more attention in the literature as researchers ‘identify and bypass the obstacles that stand between them and the refugees’ (Harrell-Bond and Voutira 2007: 295), as discussed in the Introduction to this book.
