Elevating a Well-founded Fear of Sexual Violence to a Form of Persecution in Refugee Status Determination: Justifications for a more Inclusive Approach

Abstract

The 14th Dalai Lama said, ‘although you may not always be able to avoid difficult situations, you can modify the extent to which you can suffer by how you choose to respond to the situation’. On 30 March 1959, fearing for his life in his native Tibet, the Dalai Lama decided the best way to mitigate the extent of his suffering was to seek refuge in India – making him possibly the most famous refugee in the world. To date, and for the last 54 years, the Dalai Lama has not set foot in Tibet, the homeland of the people for whom he is the spiritual leader. For centuries the act of seeking refuge as a result of persecution has occurred across civilizations. The persecution, often on religious grounds, that occurred during the early and late modern historical periods, resulted in mass displacement. The best example is perhaps the French Huguenots, five hundred thousand of whom fled to different corners of the globe in the face of religious persecution. Moreover, many of the great intellectuals of the modern era, including Victor Hugo, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Conrad, Friedrich Nietzsche and indeed, Albert Einstein, were refugees. Similarly, today millions of people seek to escape the hardship they have endured in their home states by becoming refugees in foreign, sometimes hostile, environments. This process has come to be formally regulated through international law.