Gender and cultural silences in the political asylum process

Sexualities ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. 939-957 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Shuman ◽  
Carol Bohmer
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Asylum ◽  
The Law

Individuals claiming persecution on the basis of gender or as sexual minorities have faced many obstacles in the political asylum process including additional burdens of proof of identity and of persecution. Based on our own work with political asylum applicants, on legal reports, and on reports by groups providing assistance to asylum seekers, we review the law and the obstacles and consider the conditions underlying and supporting suspicion of the applicants. We observe how particular narratives are rendered untellable in the interrogation process and how the identities of sexual minorities become either invisible or hypervisible.

Getting Out: Political asylum, sexual minorities, and privileged visibility

Sexualities ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. 1016-1034 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Shuman ◽  
Wendy S Hesford
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Asylum

As part of an emerging field of films documenting the obstacles faced by sexual minorities fleeing persecution and seeking political asylum, the film Getting Out documents both the persecution of sexual minorities in Uganda and the obstacles individuals face in their attempts to get political asylum in South Africa. Using the film as a springboard, we assess the larger issues of recognition, visibility, hypervisibility, and performativity in encounters between sexual minorities, their advocates, and political asylum officials. The rhetorical power of Getting Out lies in its performative staging of LGBTQI asylum seekers’ navigation of often competing cultural and legal logics on sexuality. The film calls attention to profound contradictions in the political asylum system for sexual minorities and for any others who challenge the normativity of a social group.

Becoming Bare Life: Asylum, Hospitality, and the Politics of Encampment

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 649-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Darling
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Ethical Practice ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Outright Rejection ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Uk

This paper examines the politics of contemporary encampment within the UK with reference to the positioning of asylum seekers as a group subjected to a biopolitical logic of ‘compassionate repression’. The paper opens by examining the utility of presentations of the asylum seeker as an exemplar of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer. Drawing on recent critiques of the British government's apparent turn to a ‘deliberate policy of destitution’, I argue that through such acts of sovereign abandonment asylum seekers are relegated to a position reliant solely upon the ethical sensibilities of others. I then proceed to consider ways in which such a positioning ‘outside the law’ has been employed by asylum seekers and local campaigners to make ethical claims and demands upon the relational nature of the citizen as a figure of potential bare life. I then close by arguing that such an ethical gesture alone, of ‘assuming bare life’, is not enough and that the outright rejection of logics of distinction which Agamben suggests as a future politics offers little means to politically engage bare life beyond an irreconcilable ethic of the unconditionally hospitable. Opposed to this, I suggest the need to (re)engage with political theories which draw the political as always already an ethical practice in itself. Here, I examine the UK's involvement in the UNHCR Gateway Protection Programme, as an example of a conditional, and imperfect, act of hospitality, one grounded in distinction, yet one which holds both the risks of ethical practice and the possibility of political alteration at its heart.

The New Terrain of International Law

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen J. Alter
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Courts ◽  
Constitutional Review ◽  
Delegation Of Authority ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law

In 1989, when the Cold War ended, there were six permanent international courts. Today there are more than two dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. This book charts the developments and trends in the creation and role of international courts, and explains how the delegation of authority to international judicial institutions influences global and domestic politics. The book presents an in-depth look at the scope and powers of international courts operating around the world. Focusing on dispute resolution, enforcement, administrative review, and constitutional review, the book argues that international courts alter politics by providing legal, symbolic, and leverage resources that shift the political balance in favor of domestic and international actors who prefer policies more consistent with international law objectives. International courts name violations of the law and perhaps specify remedies. The book explains how this limited power—the power to speak the law—translates into political influence, and it considers eighteen case studies, showing how international courts change state behavior. The case studies, spanning issue areas and regions of the world, collectively elucidate the political factors that often intervene to limit whether or not international courts are invoked and whether international judges dare to demand significant changes in state practices.

Property in Human Body Parts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Human Body ◽  
First Principles ◽  
The Political ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Regulatory Approach ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
The Law

This chapter surveys the current legal position concerning property in bodies and bodily materials. Of especial relevance in the current age of advanced genetic and other bio technologies, it looks beyond property in bodies and their materials ‘as such’ to consider also (a) the availability of rights of personal and intellectual property in objects incorporating or derived from them, and (b) the reliance on quasi-property rights of possession and consent to regulate the storage and use of corpses and detached bodily materials, including so-called ‘bio-specimens’. Reasoning from first principles, it highlights the practical and conceptual, as well as the political and philosophical, difficulties in this area, along with certain differences in the regulatory approach of European and US authorities. By way of conclusion, it proposes the law of authors’ and inventors’ rights as simultaneously offering a cautionary tale to those who would extend the reach of property even further than it extends currently and ideas for exploiting the malleability of the ‘property’ concept to manage the risks of extending it.

V. II principio dell’irretroattività della legge nell’esperienza giuridica romana dell’età repubblicana

2021 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-273
Author(s):  
Umberto Laffi
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
The Law ◽  
Criminal Legislation ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence

Abstract The Principle of the Irretroactivity of the Law in the Roman Legal Experience in the Republican Age. Through an in-depth analysis of literary and legal sources (primarily Cicero) and of epigraphic evidence, the author demonstrates that the principle of the law’s non-retroactivity was known to, and applied by, the Romans since the Republican age. The political struggle favored on several occasions the violation of this principle by imposing an extraordinary criminal legislation, aimed at sanctioning past behaviors of adversaries. But, although with undeniable limits of effectiveness in the dynamic relationship with the retroactivity, the author acknowledges that at the end of the first century BC non-retroactivity appeared as the dominant principle, consolidated both in the field of the civil law as well as substantive criminal law.

Agonistic Conflict as a Distinct Type of Contentious Politics: Learning from Protests For and Against Asylum Seekers in Israel

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-118
Author(s):  
Tali Hatuka ◽  
Miryam Wijler
Keyword(s):  
State Policy ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Distinct Type ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
The Relationship

This paper focuses on a particular form of protest that emerges in what this paper calls an 'agonistic environment'. It defines the latter as a form of contentious politics within deliberative democracies in which concurrence rather than estrangement is more likely to define the relationship between citizens and the state. It then asks what is the nature of conflict in such environments, and will activism in the settings be more or less likely to generate change. Finally, it considers whether protest in agonistic environments produces a form of shared knowledge among parties to the conflict, particularly with respect to the possibility of change and how best to achieve it? In exploring these questions, the paper focuses on the political dynamics in Israel associated with the wave of African asylum seekers who arrived from 2010 to 2012, most of whom originated from Eritrea and Sudan. Using a quantitative approach, the paper analyses this agonistic environment focusing on two dimensions: (a) protest events; and (b) state policy and juridical decisions as well as legal initiatives aimed at challenging state policy and relevant court decisions. By highlighting the scalar mismatch between protests focused on delimited urban spaces and responses of authorities at the scale of the nation – in this case, legal rulings – the paper further advances our understanding of agonistic conflict and how it produces change.

The impact of Political Parties Law no. 36 of 2015 on requlatinq political parties pluralism in Iraq

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurdistan Saeed
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
The Law ◽  
Lack Of Commitment ◽  
The Impact

This study deals with the political parties’ pluralism in Iraq under the Parties Law No. 36 of 2015. The importance of the study lies in the fact that it looks at a topic that is at the heart of democracy and it is necessary for the success of any democratic processes. The study focuses on parties’ pluralism in Iraq since the establishment of the Iraqi state in 1921 until the end of the Baath Party regime in 2003, it also covers the period after 2003 and pays particular attention to the Parties Law No. 36 of 2015. It focuses on the legal framework of political parties after the adoption of the Political Parties Law and studies the impact of this law on parties’ pluralism in Iraq after its approval in 2015. The study concludes that Law No. 36 of 2015 is incapable of regulating parties’ pluralism for reasons including: the lack of commitment by the political parties to the provisions of the law, the inability of the Parties Affairs Department to take measures against parties that violate the law the absence of a strong political opposition that enhances the role of political parties, the association of most Iraqi parties with foreign agendas belonging to neighboring countries, and the fact that the majority of Iraqi parties express ethnic or sectarian orientations at the expense of national identity.

scholarly journals Is This Tax Reform, or Just Confusion?

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Slemrod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Tax Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Tax Base ◽  
Tax System ◽  
The Law ◽  
Jobs Act ◽  
Tax Cuts

Based on the experience of recent decades, the United States apparently musters the political will to change its tax system comprehensively about every 30 years, so it seems especially important to get it right when the chance arises. Based on the strong public statements of economists opposing and supporting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, a causal observer might wonder whether this law was tax reform or mere confusion. In this paper, I address that question and, more importantly, offer an assessment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law is clearly not “tax reform” as economists usually use that term: that is, it does not seek to broaden the tax base and reduce marginal rates in a roughly revenue-neutral manner. However, the law is not just a muddle. It seeks to address some widely acknowledged issues with corporate taxation, and takes some steps toward broadening the tax base, in part by reducing the incentive to itemize deductions.

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