Posts by Miatta Gorvie

Miatta Gorvie is a student in the LL.B./B.C.L. program at the McGill University Faculty of Law, class of 2014. Her interest in international law stems from her previous studies in international development and globalization.

Israel’s other refugee question

This past August, visiting Israel for the first time and staying with a friend in south Tel Aviv, I was immediately struck by the number of African faces I saw in her neighbourhood. These Africans, I was informed, were migrants mostly from Eritrea, Darfur, and Southern Sudan (now the Republic of South Sudan) who were seeking protection in Israel under the 1951 Refugee Convention. You see, until that point, my knowledge of Israel’s refugee issues extended only to the question of the right of return of the Palestinians expelled in 1948 and their descendants. As a “final status” issue in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and one that cuts to the core of the national identities of both factions, it is easy to understand how this new class of African refugees can escape the attention of human rights lawyers and advocates abroad.

I was in Israel taking part in a program on law and internal diversity, a partnership of McGill and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, so thankfully I was able to explore Israel’s refugee policies in greater detail in a course on migration and diversity. For conceptual clarity, an asylum seekers is a person who is making a claim under the Refugee Convention and and a refugee is one whose claim has been accepted by the receiving country. It is notoriously difficult to collect statistics on migration flows,…

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The unbearable burden of proof: the re-victimization of gay asylum-seekers by the courts

In early December, the government of the Czech Republic came under fire from European Union and international human rights observers when it became known that the country was still using “phallometric” tests for ascertaining the homosexuality of gay asylum seekers[1]. The antiquated test requires the applicants to be strapped to a device which measures their levels of sexual arousal in response to stimuli. In the Czech case, the applicants were shown heterosexual porn; if they became aroused by a man and woman having sex they were deemed not gay, and therefore, not eligible for asylum. This type of test is most likely to offend the sensibilities of the public; its absurdity and harm to basic human dignity is glaringly obvious. However, a more pervasive and systemic form of judicial discrimination against gay asylum-seekers continues to take place. Canada is among many refugee-receiving nations that are still assessing the legitimacy of these men’s claims on the basis of stereotypes and unreasonable, and at worst dangerous, expectations of the claimants.

The process for determining the asylum seeker’s admissibility is “deceptively simple”[2]: the judge must determine first, whether or not the claimant is gay, and second, whether they are, or they will be, in danger of persecution. Refugees claiming asylum on the basis of persecution related to sexual orientation fall under the residual category of “membership of…

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