Mainstreaming Refugee Women’s Rights Advocacy

On June 11, 2018, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a decision which signifies a regression in the willingness to protect women fleeing from domestic violence through the framework of the refugee convention. By contrast this paper argues that International Refugee Law would benefit from an additional mode of engagement with feminism. Instead of simply introducing feminist theory into International Refugee Law, we suggest — in light of the underlying commonality among all women, regardless of status — that International Refugee Law would benefit from conjoining advocacy efforts on behalf of refugee women with those undertaken on behalf marginalized and disempowered women more generally. Such a shift would be of particular importance in jurisdictions in which the legal, social or political willingness to protect and promote women’s rights outweigh the willingness to protect the rights of refugees. Arising from a more fundamental human rights framework that explicitly include women as humans, this legal perspective would provide deeper protection to asylum seeking women, changing the legal focus from questions of status determination as to whether someone — man or woman — qualifies for protection as a refugee, to broader questions regarding the personhood of women and the entire set of necessary civil, social, economic and cultural rights deriving from said personhood. In other words, the shift would be from a mostly negative-duty protection perspective to a both negative- and positive-duty perspective. This shift would also create opportunities for solidarity between asylum seeking women and other women, including other immigrants, residents, and citizens, national minorities, and general feminist and women’s rights groups. Such a linkage would allow asylum seeking women to benefit from the progress already achieved by feminist movements regarding women’s rights, rather than marginalizing them and confining them to seek their rights exclusively as refugees. The call for mainstreaming the discourse on refugee rights into the discourse on women’s rights offers an important theoretical contribution that goes beyond the discussion of asylum seeking women’s rights. Namely, is it strategically, theoretically or doctrinally preferable to advocate for the rights of refugees via instruments of International Human Rights, rather than via International Refugee Law; and if so, under what circumstances? We find significant arguments in favor of abandoning the prevailing view that International Refugee Law is a separate branch of international law to be applied and interpreted according to its own fundamental concepts, and in isolation from other areas of international law. International conventions on human rights are applicable to refugees, as they apply to “all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction,” or “everyone,” and not merely to members of the political community. We demonstrate our argument with a regional focus on the treatment of asylum seeking women in Israel. The exploration of the questions in this paper draws on the work of the Coalition on Asylum Seeking Women and Children in Israel, which constitutes a rich, novel and groundbreaking approach to the advocacy on behalf of asylum seeking women. The Coalition has been operating since September 2016, and consists of women’s rights, migrant women’s rights and children’s rights organizations and clinics. By embedding this theoretical and doctrinal legal question in the lived experience of women asylum seekers and women’s rights advocates, the examination of the advocacy efforts and raison d'etre of the Coalition could demonstrate how this model can be applied in additional jurisdictions, mutatis mutandis.