When the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1993, it gave long overdue recognition to the fact that gendered domestic violence is not a private issue, but a public health and human rights concern for the international community. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision this week to stop giving asylum protections for domestic violence victims stands in grim conflict with this principle.
On Monday, Sessions reversed an immigration court’s ruling that granted asylum to a woman from El Salvador whose husband had repeatedly abused her physically, sexually, and emotionally. The court ruled in 2014 that domestic violence victims constitute a social group when it comes to asylum considerations. But in a 31-page ruling with profound implications for immigration policy, Sessions wrote that “generally” claims on domestic and gang violence will no longer qualify for asylum and will not even reach the initial “credible fear” standard to allow an immigrant to have her asylum claim heard by a judge. Victims of domestic and gang violence, in other words, won’t even be able to have their claims for asylum heard.
The effect of Sessions’s ruling could be sweeping and immediate. Immigration attorneys have said this decision could invalidate tens of thousands of pending asylum claims from women fleeing domestic and gang violence, which often intersect, in Central America and Mexico.
Sessions reasoned that, as victims of “private criminal activity” perpetrated by nongovernmental actors, these asylum seekers fail to meet the legal standard to be considered asylees. Yet in conjuring the legal category of “private” crime — which has no legal meaning — Sessions and his Justice Department rejected the idea that epidemic levels of domestic violence put women in the societal position of a persecuted group. It is the very sort of logic — framing gendered violence as a private, rather than a systematic, human rights issue — that has enabled centuries of domestic abuse without any accountability.
“His claim that this is a ‘private crime’ is a return to a misogynist framework that assesses women as property,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a human and civil rights legal organization, told me. She said that under Sessions’s determinations, “Crimes against women as chattel by the masters of a household or relationship thus are not human rights violations, but just ‘personal circumstances.’”
Please continue this article here: https://theintercept.com/2018/06/15/domestic-violence-asylum-jeff-sessions/
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