Suchergebnisse

This article examines asylum-seeker women's appeals involving forced marriage at the Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) in the UK over the past 20 years. Internationally forced marriage has long been understood as a human rights issue. In the UK, the government has introduced a range of policy and legislative measures to tackle forced marriage of its nationals that have been framed within human rights discourse. The aim of this article is to examine the ways in which forced marriage has been framed by the Tribunal in women's asylum claims. Informed by feminist contributions to gender and refugee law, the article reveals two problematic and interrelated trends. First, that gendered harm in the form of forced marriage continues to be contained in the "private" sphere. And secondly, that a noteworthy trend of trivialisation through conflation of forced and arranged marriage, and the use of euphemisms emerges. As a result, these gendered representations evidence a continuing failure of refugee law to take women's rights violations seriously.

Women continue to face challenges in having their asylum claims recognized under the Refugee Convention. This is to a significant extent due to the ways in which the Convention is applied to women's claims and is particularly the case in gender-based persecution claims. While there have been important advances in the field of gender and refugee law, contributing to an improved understanding of the relevance of gender within international refugee law, there remains a need for more gender-sensitive interpretations of the Convention. This article critiques the ways in which the political opinion ground of the Refugee Convention has been applied to some women's forced marriage claims in the United Kingdom. Women's gender-based persecution claims are often categorized under the membership of a particular social group ground and the political opinion ground remains an underused and narrowly interpreted category. Drawing on feminist critiques, it is argued that this demonstrates an underlying gendered politics, and that the political opinion ground can indeed be relevant to women's asylum claims involving forced marriage. Women's resistance to their gendered oppression in the form of forced marriage should be seen as a valid expression of their political opinion and agency.