Help needed with survey on EU-wide LGBT asylum claims

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By Joël Le Déroff, Policy & Programmes Officer

ILGA-Europe is currently trying to gather information on asylum claims lodged in EU countries in the last years.

As you know, sexual orientation is included in EU directives as a reason for persecution enabling asylum seekers to lodge a claim in the EU. However, we know, from our day-to-day experience, that many countries do refuse to grant asylum, even where there is an obvious and documented risk of persecution.

To reinforce our actions and our dialogue with the European institutions, we need you to help us by sending information on individual cases. The kind of information we need is information on cases where a decision has already been taken, the reason for this being that we will use that data:

• to illustrate the need for an improvement of the existing legislation;
• to feed the European Commission with examples of bad implementation of the existing legislation, for them to consider launching infringements procedures against Member States.

We would particularly appreciate if you could share with us available information on cases of transgender asylum seekers. So far, ILGA-Europe has little information on such cases, but we believe that there is an opportunity to improve the existing EU directives as regards “gender related aspects”, in the frame on the next recast of the EU asylum legislation.

You can use this form to send us the information. We are interested in collecting data both on anonymous cases and on cases where it is possible to openly mention the name of the asylum seeker or refugee.

• Further information joel@ilga-europe.org