Proyect

“Gender-based persecution: Information on countries of origin within the framework of the right to asylum”.

The current Asylum law (Law 12/2009, of the 30^th of October, which regulates the right to asylum and subsidiary protection) includes persecution based on gender and sexual orientation as grounds for asylum. This formal recognition represents a step forward with regard to previous legislation and a quite significant advance towards equality between men and women and towards the recognition of the violence that Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals, Transgender, Bisexuals and Intersexuals (LGTTBI) suffer.

Nevertheless, it conditions the recognition of asylum status to people persecuted on these grounds to what is called “prevailing circumstances in the country of origin”. This condition, that represents an additional obstacle for these people and for the organisations that accompany asylum procedures, is not required for any other reason among those included in Spanish law –race, religion, nationality, membership of a specific social group, political opinion- nor, of course, in the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees.

Human rights organisations in many regions also state the problems they have to gather reliable information on certain violations of human rights that are still not fully recognised, are covered up by state and non-state entities, and where investigating to find out what happened and bring to trial the perpetrators means accepting the risk of persecution.

With this project CEAR-Euskadi, in collaboration with international organisations, human rights organisations and specialists from the North and the South, hopes to continue to make progress in demanding the right to asylum as a means of international protection for people persecuted based on gender, as well as in the defence of sexual and reproductive rights in their interpretation as basic rights.

For this reason, this initiative, which falls within the work carried out over the last ten years, is aimed at continuing to further and organise the work in defence of the right to asylum for people persecuted because of their gender and to raise greater awareness among strategic agents in Basque society by informing them about the most important forms of persecution and by analysing the information that exists on the situation in the country of origin of people persecuted for these reasons.

We hope that this Project helps to achieve a better understanding of this phenomenon.

You can access the information about the project at: http://www.sinrefugio.org/ipo/