The thesis focuses on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada's Guidelines on Women Refugee Claimants Fearing Gender-Related Persecution, released in 1993. The guidelines were designed to address a perceived shortcoming in international refugee law and its domestic applications, namely, the omission of gender-based persecution from the protection of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The omission of gender from the UN Convention had resulted in gender inequalities in the evaluation of asylum claims, inequalities the Canadian guidelines were designed to correct. However, since the inception of the guidelines, critics have dismissed the directives as numerically ineffective, pointing to the low numbers of women requesting asylum on the basis of gender-related persecution. While such a numerical analysis may be useful, the thesis argues it is incomplete. The thesis centres instead on the vital consciousness-raising role played by the guidelines, both domestically and abroad, and on the concrete results engendered by this function in the international realm of women's human rights.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.33285 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Guha, Julia Patricia. |
| Contributors | Black, Jerome (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Political Science.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001778291, proquestno: MQ70594, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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