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...by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, as well as changes that have occurred due to the post-September 11 security climate. The article reflects on the research methodology and highlights the key conclusions of the report. The report's seventy-nine recommendations are also presented here.
Resume
L'article presente le rapport intitule Gendering Canada's Refugee Process (Determination du statut de refugie au Canada selon le sexe), publie par Condition feminine Canada en juin 2006. Il explore de quelle maniere, a quel moment et pour quelle raison le facteur sexe intervient dans la determination du statut de refugie au Canada. La recherche se situe dans le cadre des changements amenes par la Loi sur l'immigration et la protection des refugies, et par les dispositifs de securite mis en place apres le 11 septembre. L'essai se penche sur la methodologie de recherche du rapport, en fait ressortir les conclusions cles et presente les 79 recommandations qu'il contient.
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Status of Women Canada is scheduled to release the report entitled Gendering Canada's Refugee Process in June 2006. I was the principal investigator for this project and the lead author of the report.(1) Our final draft was completed in April 2005 and in the time between then and April 2006 (quaintly known as "at time of writing"), the report has gone through the predictable refereeing, copy editing, page proofing, and translation stages. It would be reasonable enough to think that I had tired of a project that was launched in May 2003, but the opportunity to introduce this research to the Refuge community, and the associated occasion to reflect on its construction and aspire for its future, proves irresistible.
In this short article, I introduce the research by outlining why we undertook the project and how we conducted the work. This makes a place for reflection on our methodological choices, and charts a path for further work. I then consider our regrets, things we had aspired to but could not achieve and why this is so. Finally, I highlight some of our findings, and set out again here the seventy-nine recommendations of the report because of my belief that if even some of these were taken up by current policy makers, considerable improvements could be made. In the current political climate in Canada, advocates are forced to argue for the status quo as "best practice" against a host of forces that would prefer an erosion of the current refugee determination system. Writing Gendering Canada's Refugee Process offered a comparatively rare opportunity to imagine improvements, and to be supported by generous government funding in so doing.
Why We Did It
This research set out to investigate changes to Canada's refugee protection system which had been brought in by the 2002 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), (2) and in particular to investigate how, when, and why gender matters in refugee determination. In addition to new legislation for the first time in twenty-five years, two other factors contributed to making the research timely. The first was the shift in the politics of security following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The second was the innovative statement in the IRPA that the government would report annually on the gendered effects of the legislation. (3) These three factors helped make a case for the grant application to the Research Directorate of Status of Women Canada program on human security.
The less official story of why is also important. In this instance, the research was spurred on by Leonora Angeles's pedagogic innovation. In the autumn of 2002 she required that graduate students in the Asian Public Policy Program write a grant application as an assignment for one of her courses. Chantal Proulx, Jenelyn Torres, Masako Tsusuki, and Anna Turinov undertook this project together. In searching out people at the University of British Columbia (UBC) who could assist them, they approached both me and Erin Baines. Erin, Nora, and I jointly decided that the students' original idea of twinning refugee matters with human security was important and that the timing was right to develop a fully articulated proposal from the original assignment. The three of us applied for the funding together, with the original students as researchers on the project. (4)
There has been a lot written about women in refugee law. Our work is different from the majority of other work in the area, and we hope this difference is complementary. This is also part of the "why" of this work. Academic research and analysis along with hands-on activism has been vital, since the mid 1980s, in putting gender on the refugee issues map. (5) While there is still much to be concerned about in this area, it is undoubtedly the case that gender is now clearly identified as an issue to be reckoned with in refugee law. Following concerted work by feminist activists and scholars, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched its first Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women in 1991. (6) Led by Canada, many Western refugee-receiving countries now have policy guidelines on gender-related persecution. (7) The UNHCR updated both its guidelines and its language with a statement on gender-related persecution in 2002, and since 2001 has been working to implement is gender equality mainstreaming program. (8)
Our work is complementary to much of the existing work in that it is not jurisprudential. That is, it is not primarily about gender-related persecution or the interpretive trends in refugee law. This is a significant thing to leave out, so it is vital to understand what we have done instead. In a sense our point of departure is this: let's assume the gender-related persecution guidelines are perfect and their interpretation and application are seamless, would this solve all the dilemmas of gender in the refugee determination process? To answer this question, we have taken a long view of refugee determination in Canada, considering what happens to women and men from the moment they decide to make a refugee claim to the time when they are either permanent residents in Canada united with their close family members or when they have left the country. While the jurisprudential content of a given refugee decision is the centrepiece of this trajectory, it is also a discrete point in the process, neither the beginning nor the end.
In keeping with this non-jurisprudential...
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