Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia
![handle is hein.journals/mulr26 and id is 152 raw text is: IMAGINING OTHERNESS: REFUGEE CLAIMS ON THE
BASIS OF SEXUALITY IN CANADA AND AUSTRALIA
JENNI MILLBANK*
[In refugee determinations based upon sexuality, Western decision-makers must come to terms with
the other other, a lesbian or gay man from a different culture. They must translate that experience of
sexuality and culture not just into the international and national framework of reflgee law but into
something intelligible to themselves. This process is one that requires empathy and imagination. This
paper is based upon a comparative analysis of 331 decisions concerning sexuality from the refugee
tribunals in Australia and Canada, covering six years from January 1994 to April 2000. The
decisions examined are potent evidence of the public/private divide in the Western refugee-receiving
nations of Canada and Australia. What is and what is not protected conduct in the decisions
effectively decrees what is and is not proper for lesbians and gay men to do, both here and 'there'.
The result of this projected sense of the public/private divide is to trap applicants in a tightly woven
paradox: if they are too public they are transgressive, repellent and in danger of being rejected as
deserving of the abuse they have experienced. If they are too private, they run the risk that their
claims will not qualify as persecution and will be regarded as merely private and/or readily avoided.]
CONTENTS
I In tro du ctio n ............................................................................................................. 14 5
II E m pathy and Im agination ....................................................................................... 148
III Private A buses and Private Selves .......................................................................... 158
IV Public Sex and Public Selves .................................................................................. 164
V C o n clu sion ............................................................................................................... 177
[Let the Americans keep their] sodomy, bestiality, stupid and foolish ways to
themselves. ... Let the gays be gays in the United States and Europe, ... But
they shall be sad people here.
Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, 19951
She ... wished to remain in Australia [to] 'put land and water' between herself
and her problems.
Evidence of a lesbian applicant from Venezuela, cited in the RRT, 19992
BA, LLB (Syd), LLM (UBC); Senior Lecturer in Law, The University of Sydney. This paper is
based on research devised and undertaken with Dr Catherine Dauvergne and supported by a
grant from the University of Sydney Faculty of Law Legal Scholarship Support Fund. My
deepest thanks to Catherine for her inspiration as a collaborator and colleague, and for her
comments on this tentative first paper from our joint research. In our next paper from this
research we will focus upon questions of identity and evidence. Thanks also to Arlie Loughnan
for her meticulous research assistance and case analysis.
Quoted in James Roberts, 'Mugabe's Ill-Fitting Suit of Moral Outrage', Independent (London),
27 August 1995, 12.
2 Refugee Review Tribunal ('RRT') Reference No N98/21316 (Unreported, P Cristoffanini,
26 February 1999).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/mulr26&div=13&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia
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