SPECIAL FEATURE SEVENTH COLLOQUIUM ON CHALLENGES IN INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE LAW: INTRODUCTION

Unless the risk faced by an applicant is causally connected to one of five specified attributes - his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion - the claim to be a refugee must fail.1 Because the drafters of the Refugee Convention believed that the world's asylum capacity was insufficient to accommodate all those at risk of being persecuted, they opted to confine the class of refugees to persons whose predicament stems from who they are, or what they believe - the very sorts of values enshrined in non-discrimination law. [...]while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has yet to offer a comprehensive view on the meaning of "political opinion," it has, in the context of its guidance on asylum claims by children, observed that "[a] claim based on political opinion presupposes that the applicant holds, or is assumed to hold, opinions not tolerated by the authorities or society and that are critical of generally accepted policies, traditions or methods.