THE RECEPTION OF LGBTIQ+ REFUGEES IN EUROPE (original) (raw)
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Queering Asylum in Europe: A Survey Report
2020
This report discusses the data gathered through two surveys carried out in the context of the SOGICA project. SOGICA – Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum: A European human rights challenge – is a four-year (2016-2020) research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) that explores the social and legal experiences of people across Europe claiming international protection on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI).
Springer, 2021
This two-volume open-access book offers a theoretically and empirically-grounded portrayal of the experiences of people claiming international protection in Europe on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI). It shows how European asylum systems might and should treat asylum claims based on people’s SOGI in a fairer, more humane way. Through a combined comparative, interdisciplinary (socio-legal), human rights, feminist, queer and intersectional approach, this book examines not only the legal experiences of people claiming asylum on grounds of their SOGI, but also their social experiences outside the asylum decision-making framework. The authors analyse how SOGI-related claims are adjudicated in different European frameworks (European Union, Council of Europe, Germany, Italy and UK) and offer detailed recommendations to adequately address the intersectional experiences of individuals seeking asylum. This unique approach ensures that the book is of interest not only to researchers in migration and refugee studies, law and wider academic communities, but also to policy makers and practitioners in the field of SOGI asylum.
The Ordeal for Humanity: LGBTI Asylum Seekers in Europe Facing the Limits of Human Rights
What’s “human” in the human? What makes a living being a human being? In case of doubt, who decides whether a living being is a human being? A liberal political culture based on the value of human rights cannot avoid these questions. This article will use different interpretative frames (Thomas Hobbes, Michel Foucault, Leo Bersani, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jasbir Puar) in order to give account of the permanence of a sovereign decision on the human in the biopolitical governance of the present. The condition of African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex asylum seekers in Europe is exemplary of this. Persecuted in their countries for their sexual orientation or gender identity, in many cases they cross the Mediterranean on makeshift boats to land – twist of fate – on the same islands where Italian Fascism used to confine homosexual men. There they are “received” in camps for illegal immigrants where their full humanity, denied by their countries of origin, will be taken into exam by a commission. Only if recognized as authentic members of a sexual minority, they will benefit the totality of human rights in Europe. Otherwise, they risk to be forced away from Europe – and from humanity. Far from being a voyage of hope from barbarity to modernity, their journey from Africa to Europe turns into an archaic ordeal.
Since the 1990s, the European Union (EU) has slowly developed an increasingly sophisticated body of asylum law and policy, known as the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). This framework – both in the shape of legislative instruments and case law – has inevitably also affected those asylum seekers who claim asylum on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI). This has been vividly demonstrated by particular norms in EU asylum instruments and judgments of the Court of Justice of EU (CJEU). The current CEAS can be said to have several shortcomings in relation to SOGI claims, including in relation to: country of origin information; the notion of ‘safe country of origin’; the burden of proof and the principle of benefit of the doubt; the concept of a ‘particular social group’; and the definition of persecution. A new set of proposals for reform of the CEAS was put forward in 2016 by the European Commission, and these also affect SOGI asylum claims in precise and acute ways. This policy brief scrutinises these proposals of reform, and assesses the extent to which these proposals and different institutional positions address, ignore or aggravate the issues that currently affect asylum seekers who identify as LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex). The policy brief makes fifteen recommendations for European policymakers in regards to the reform of the CEAS, in order to ensure that the needs of LGBTI asylum seekers and refugees are effectively addressed and their rights are respected. Academics from the University of Sussex working on the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum (SOGICA) project, funded by the European Research Council, are calling for policymakers to implement these recommendations in order to render the CEAS fairer for SOGI asylum seekers.
Supporting LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in Germany: a story of hope and contradiction
UCL Europe Blog, 2021
Queer asylum has become a prominent feature of Germany’s response to refugees since 2015. Queer communities have mobilised material and political support in cities like Berlin and Cologne to address the diverse needs of queer refugees in the asylum system, and to challenge homophobia, transphobia and anti-refugee sentiments more generally. Queer refugees have also become key actors in building and facilitating support for other queer refugees and asylum seekers, establishing peer-led projects that seek to address the numerous challenges they face, on their own terms. However, responses have also become fraught with contradiction and tension, the dynamics of which are explored in this article published by the UCL European Institute for LGBT+ History Month.
Queering Asylum… or Human Rights in Europe
ADiM Blog, 2021
After 70 years since the conclusion of the Convention relating to the status of refugees, the process of ‘queering’ asylum law is beyond doubt, as we have explored in The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law(Chapter 4). This process of ‘queering’ asylum law has certainly reached its highest peak in Europe, where the needs of people claiming asylum on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) are increasingly taken into account in law and practice. Yet, a four-year research project carried out across the EU has found that a range of issues remain problematic, or even unaddressed, in this field. These include: the lack of information on SOGI as grounds to claim international protection at arrival to Europe; the lack of specific procedural arrangements, including the choice of the interviewer and of the interpreter, and of appropriate reception conditions; a persistent culture of disbelief and the use of stereotypical views on sexual and gender minorities during the adjudication process of asylum claims; and the misuse and low quality of Country of Origin Information. Some of these problems could be addressed in the context of the current reform of EU asylum law, given the need to improve the Common European Asylum System in this respect. However, such a reform might not be enough, especially if we consider the evolution of European human rights law in relation to SOGI asylum.