Gender-Based Persecution
How international refugee law has evolved to recognize gender-based violence, forced marriage, and FGM as grounds for asylum.
Gender's Absence from the Convention
The 1951 Refugee Convention does not list gender as a ground for persecution. The five Convention grounds are race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, and political opinion. For decades, this meant that women fleeing gender-based violence, including domestic abuse, forced marriage, FGM, honor killings, and sexual violence, struggled to obtain refugee status because their persecution did not fit neatly into any of the five categories.
The breakthrough came through the 'particular social group' ground. Courts and UNHCR gradually recognized that women, or subsets of women (such as women from a particular country who refuse FGM), can constitute a particular social group. UNHCR's Gender Guidelines, first issued in 2002, established that gender-related claims, including sexual violence, domestic violence, forced marriage, and FGM, fall within the Convention when linked to one of the five grounds.
