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Patrolling
the Borders of Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Refugee Claims
in Canada
Sean
Rehaag
Faculty
of Law,
University
of Toronto
(Canada)
It is possible to claim refugee status in Canada
alleging a fear of persecution on account of sexual
orientation. Success rates for such claims are similar to
the success rates for traditional refugee claims. However,
one subset of sexual minority refugee claimants, those
alleging a fear of persecution on account of bisexuality,
is less successful. This article argues that a major cause
of the difficulties faced by bisexual refugee claimants is
the dominant understanding of sexual orientation as
involving a binary and unchangeable psychological or
physiological characteristic. This view of sexual
orientation underlies contemporary Canadian refugee law as
well as Canadian sexual minority human rights
jurisprudence. The life experiences of many bisexual
asylum seekers, however, cannot be easily located within
such an understanding, leading refugee adjudicators to
approach accounts of such experiences with scepticism. In
this presentation I argue that it is time for adjudicators
in the refugee law setting to embrace alternative
understandings of sexual orientation that can accommodate
bisexual and other sexual minority life stories. Such an
account can be drawn from the tradition of queer theory.
About Sean Reaag
Sean Rehaag is a doctoral candidate specializing in
border control as well as political and legal theory at
the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law. Trained in both
common and civil law, Sean’s teaching focuses on the
challenges for governing both public and private disputes
through state based adjudication in a world where legal
relations increasingly implicate multiple communities,
jurisdictions and legal traditions. In addition to his
academic work, Sean offers pro-bono legal assistance to
asylum seekers and undocumented persons through the FCJ
Refugee Centre, focusing primarily on incorporating legal
norms from international sources in gender and sexual
orientation based refugee and immigration applications.
Sean received his BCL & LLB from McGill in 2003 after
completing his BA in Political Science at UBC in 2000. He
is currently a Visiting Scholar with the Chair in
International Migration Law at the University of Montreal.
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