Group-based protection of Afghan women and girls under the 1951 refugee convention

Published online: 31 July 2023The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 deprived women and girls of their fundamental rights. The Taliban denied or severely restricted women and girls’ rights to education, work, healthcare, freedom of movement, opinion and expression, and to protection from gender-based violence. This article argues that the Taliban's treatment of Afghan women and girls amounts to persecution, and all Afghan women and girls should be recognised as refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The article further examines the feasibility of prima facie recognition for Afghan women and girls.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025)

Externalization and the UN global compact on refugees : unsafety as ripple effect

This Policy Brief examines recent externalization policy and legal initiatives in Europe that are affecting asylum seekers’ and refugees’ access to asylum. It analyses the main legal issues and policy challenges characterizing the externalisation of border controls – including the so-called push backs and pull backs by several EU Member States, and the recent unilateral initiatives to externalise asylum processing by the United Kingdom and Denmark governments, in light of their commitments under the UN Global Compact on Refugees and their obligations in international refugee and human rights law. The Policy Brief outlines the profoundly harmful consequences of externalisation of asylum initiatives considering the lessons learned from similar international experiences and their condemnation by relevant United Nations human rights monitoring bodies. It then provides a set of policy recommendations aimed at guaranteeing a genuine system of inter-state responsibility sharing in line with the UN GCR, where the EU plays an active role towards its implementation, and which fully upholds international refugee and human rights standards

The end of the right to seek asylum? : COVID-19 and the future of refugee protection

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the institution of asylum, exacerbating longer term trends limiting the ability of asylum seekers to cross-borders to seek protection. As a result, the early months of 2020 saw an effective extinguishment of the right to seek asylum. This working paper examines how this played out in Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States. National and regional responses varied, with Australia and the United States effectively ending asylum seeking. In Europe, some states upheld the right to seek asylum by exempting asylum seekers from general border closures, while other countries used the crisis to suspend the right to seek asylum. Finally, this working paper explores strategies for restoring and protecting the right to seek asylum beyond the pandemic

Implementing the united nations global compact on refugees? global asylum governance and the role of the European Union

This Policy Brief presents the preliminary findings and policy recommendations emerging from the first 18 months of the ASILE H2020 project (Global Asylum Governance and the EU’s Role). It provides an analysis of asylum governance instruments that have been portrayed as ‘promising practices’ in countries like Brazil, Canada, Jordan, South Africa as well as in the EU. These include instruments like resettlement, community sponsorships, humanitarian admission programmes, and trade deals focused on refugee labour market integration in hosting countries. The Brief highlights that while these instruments present some relevant mobility and inclusionary components, they also display a set of exclusionary features which operationalise hierarchies of deservedness and temporariness. They also lead to discrimination that is incompatible with state commitments under international and regional human rights and rule of law standards. The Policy Brief provides a set of lessons learned in the implementation of the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum and the EU’s cooperation with third countries on migration and asylum management in light of the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees