Relation of protection: law, religion and gender in the processing of a Lebanese asylum seeker

Résumé 0

This article takes up a decision from the Refugee Review Tribunal of Australia to recognise a Lebanese woman as a refugee on 11 May 2012. The woman, a Sunni Muslim, had left Lebanon for Australia and applied for that country's protection from her abusive ex-husband, a Maronite Christian. This kind of claim does not typically align with the definition of a refugee, being motivated by ‘personal’ or ‘private’ relations, rather than ‘political’ reasons. The outcome therefore depended not on the veracity or degree of her abuse, but on the ‘systematic and discriminatory’ failure of Lebanese authorities to protect her from it, including police responses and Lebanon's personal status laws. The article argues that the earnest application of international human-rights norms in the Refugee Review Tribunal belies a secular conceit in the superiority of modern law over what it conceives as other, ‘religion-based’, legal systems, a conceit particularly acute with regard to its relative capacity to protect women and deliver gender equality. Building on recent literature on the entanglements of secularism and sexual difference, religious and colonial-era law, and sectarianism and the personal status courts in Lebanon, the article presents the relation of protection extended by the Australian state to the Lebanese woman as contiguous with historical and neo-colonial logics. Finally, the article poses contemporaneous executions of secular Australian sovereignty on Nauru and the seas between Indonesia and Australia to unsettle the sharp distinctions between Lebanon and Australia that enable the decision in file 1202163 [2012] RRTA 396. © 2018, © 2018 Council for British Research in the Levant.