This article explores the refugee standard in United States asylum law as applied to noncombatants caught up in the violence of civil unrest, principally on the basis of two recent decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) expanding the availability of political asylum for claims arising in the context of non-international armed conflict. Historically, decisions in the United States have ranged between those recognizing the weight of generalized violencc and those in which a more individualized assessment is sought. Decision-makers have often conduded that the ‘harm or suffering’ complained of flows from general conditions of unrest and so is not based on a Convention or statutory ground. In one recent decision, the Board, finding for the claimant, adopted a ‘non-comparative’ approach to determining refugee status in civil war situations which focuses not on whether the asylum seeker is more at risk than anyone else in the country but on whether the claimant has established a link between serious harm and a refugee ground. In a second decision, the Board determined that severe extra-judicial punishment was tantamount to persecution on account of imputed political opinion rather than mistreatment arising out of legitimate governmental intelligence gathering. Departing from earlier approaches, the Board ruled that the asylum seeker is not under a burden to establish the exact motivation of his or her persecutor, but only to adduce some evidence showing that persecution on one of the protected grounds is reasonable. The author contrasts the Board's recent decisions with comparable developments taking place in Canadian refugee law and particularly with recently published Guidelines on civilian non-combatants issued by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. The emerging refugee criteria in civil war situations reflect the growing significance of human rights and humanitarian law violations in establishing asylum eligibility, particularly where peremptory norms are involved, and the article reviews recent developments regarding common article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocol II. The author begins by analysing the contradictions in United States asylum law in civil war cases, summarizes the Canadian Guidelines regarding the ‘well-founded fear’ standard as applied to non-combatants in civil war, examines in detail the recent BIA decisions, and looks finally at the potential collateral consequences of the decisions in light of international humanitarian law developments.