New asylum protection categories and elusive filtering devices: the case of ‘Queer asylum’ in France and the UK

ABSTRACT

In Europe asylum seekers are confronted with migration-filtering techniques when beginning their rights claiming procedures, during the decision-making process of their asylum claims, and finally across the procedural constraints imposed on them. In this article, I want to look at asylum through a focus on newly recognised refugee protection categories: sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). In so doing, I concentrate on the ordinary, yet effective, manifestations of the filtering devices inherent in the politics of asylum by examining the elusiveness of current migration control practices. I aim to elaborate on the discrepancy between the widening of refugee protection, through the inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation as grounds of asylum, and the increasingly restrictive practices that define the refugee granting process in France and the UK. The analytical considerations in the article emerge from interviewing and conducting ethnography over a three-year period between London, Paris and Marseille with gender and sexual minority refugees, immigration lawyers and refugee support workers and volunteers. The article seeks to sociologically investigate the claim of ‘asylum as filtering device’ within two western European national settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• refugees
• sexualities
• gender
• asylum

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Although this should not be the case according to the rule of law, the research indicates that often even those migrants who should not be detained, because they did not present the risk of absconding or because they fell into the vulnerable persons’ category, had been put in immigration removal centres for extended periods of time.

2 In order to guarantee research participants’ anonymity and confidentiality all names used in this text are pseudonyms and names of cities of origin have been omitted.

3 Directive 2004/83/EC Qualification Directive, article 10.

4 The imagined type of sexual behaviours or identities on the part of abjudicators is still often based on the figures of urban white middle-class gays and lesbians. This has been noted through ethnographic studies of the refugee granting process both in the UK (Giametta 2017) and in France (Kobelinsky 2012).

5 Directive 2013/32/EU on common procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection. Article 15.2.

6 Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that:

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Available on: http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Guide_Art_8_ENG.pdf. Accessed in November 2017.

7 In France, the work authorisation can be obtained at the prefectures, which are administration bodies belonging to the Ministry of the Interior. This is where asylum claimants need to go to start their asylum application (prior to the official interview they need to attend at the OFPRA). There is one prefecture in each French department, that is, 101 in the entire country. In an interview, a barrister from Paris told me that some of her clients had positive answers from the prefectures concerning their right to work, yet the lawyer also mentioned that it depends on the prefecture, she said: ‘I think it’s easier to get good decisions in other prefectures than in the Ile de France, because here it’s very crowed and there is a lot of pressure. But still, it’s still a legal possibility’.