Asylum Welcome rejects Suella Braverman’s unfounded claims regarding gender and sexuality as illegitimate grounds to claim asylum in the UK.

Braverman claims that “simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin” is no longer a good enough basis on which to be granted refugee status, because there are “vast swathes of the world where it is extremely difficult to be gay, or to be a woman.” In reality, being “fearful of discrimination” is not, and has never been, the basis on which asylum is granted.

The 1951 Convention defines a refugee as someone with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”. A fear of persecution and a fear of discrimination are two very different things. While discrimination, as well as persecution, should be taken very seriously – and this speech raises a question as to how seriously discrimination is being taken by the Home Secretary at a domestic level – Ms Braverman’s claims that asylum is being granted on the basis of ‘discrimination’ reveal ignorance as to the content and interpretation of the 1951 Convention, and its implementation in the UK, and a willingness to cruelly play politics with people’s lives.

Ms Braverman’s comments make light of the serious and well-documented evidence that women and those who identify as LGBTQI+ in countries around the world face extreme violence, oppression, and the risk of death merely for who they are and who they love. As one of our spokespeople says: “What she calls discrimination is an immediate danger for me and the queer people I know.”

Far from an easy route to safety, persecution on the basis of gender and sexuality is not yet fully recognised within the refugee system, and those making asylum claims on the basis of their sexuality often report an extensive culture of homophobia and disbelief in deciding their asylum claims. As an Asylum Welcome member says,

“Braverman is in no place to define people’s fear as ‘discrimination’. It is so dismissive and violent. The only hope you have when you live in countries where people are happy to take ‘justice’ into their own hands is to make yourself invisible. That doesn’t always work. It is so easy for the Home Secretary to reduce people’s experiences and we don’t have a proper medium to refute these narratives. If we did, we fear outing ourselves in public where even our diaspora community may be violent towards us.”

We believe that the Refugee Convention requires strengthening, not watering down. International refugee protection and domestic legislation needs to be updated to ensure that every person can find a place of sanctuary. The Refugee Convention requires added protections for people fleeing climate disasters, protection for internally displaced peoples, wider sharing/support agreements that help alleviate the strain on low- and middle-income countries, which currently host 76% of refugees globally, and crucially, an international legal mechanism which could hand out penalties to states deemed to have breached the terms of the Convention.

Asylum Welcome continues to stand with people seeking asylum and refugees in this struggle, regardless of gender and sexual identity. To learn more about the challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ refugees in the UK, take a look at some of the links and resources below.