'LOS DERECHOS DE LOS SOLICITANTES DE ASILO LGBTI TRAS LA AGENDA EUROPEA DE MIGRACIÓN'

Since its inception, International Human Rights Law has been concerned with protecting those most exposed to violence and discrimination. However, their development in the aftermath of World War II ignored LGBTI people. The acknowledgment of this group as subjects of human rights has progressed slowly but inexorably. A good example of this is the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Although its provisions do not mention LGBTI people, it has eventually included them in its scope thanks to the case-law of the Court of Strasbourg. The same tendency is echoed in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. As a result, the refugee definition has evolved to accommodate persons who are very different in all probability from the people conceived by its drafters. Since the 1980s, LGBTI asylum-seekers have gradually acceded to refugee status. This is no small achievement. All too often, the violence suffered by these people is perpetrated while national authorities remain impassive or even participate in the oppression. Against this backdrop, many LGBTI people are forced to flee their countries of origin seeking the protection their States cannot or refuse to provide. However, the definition of refugee of the Geneva Convention fails to address issues of gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression and sexual characteristics, being more suitable to protect a male, European, cisgender and heterosexual refugee than an LGBTI asylum seeker. Although persecution on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity is now widely accepted in International Refugee Law, LGBTI asylum applications present a high degree of complexity, leading to many and varied issues affecting every element of the refugee definition. A sizeable number of these refugees flee to European States, whose societies portray themselves to the outside world as the strongest bulwarks of the LGBTI. However, European States are currently caught up in a primarily securitarian logic that sees refugees and irregular migrants as threats to their security, stability and "European way of life". As a result, regulations governing asylum status and procedures have been developing in an increasingly repressive way. The crisis of the Common European Asylum System that followed the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers has led to a "new normal" in which the limitation of the rights of asylum seekers is not only legitimate and possible, but also desirable. In this thesis, we examine how this approach to migration affects LGBTI asylum seekers.