Women-Friendliness in European Asylum Policies: The Role of Women’s Political Representation and Opposition to Non-EU Immigration

Abstract

Based on the 1951 Refugee Convention, traditional conceptions of refugees typically referred to the politically active male persecuted for his obstructive acts against a communist regime. Yet, today’s asylum seekers are increasingly female with very different experiences of persecution and different reasons to flee their countries of origin. Not all states have updated their asylum policies to reflect the specific situation of women—an issue the refugee crisis in 2015 brought to glaring light. We develop a Women-Friendliness in Asylum Index (WFA), which reveals clusters of states within the European Union (EU) with a solid implementation of women’s rights in their asylum recognition and reception framework and others whom have yet to adapt their asylum policies to consider women’s needs. In addition, we show that women’s political representation is a key factor in explaining women-friendly asylum policies, whereas critical attitudes toward immigrants from non-EU countries retard the gendered revision of European asylum policies.