Migration, gender, and the limits of rights

This chapter examines the significance of gender in three areas of law relating to migration: human trafficking, migrant domestic workers, and gender-related asylum law. It argues that human rights norms have the potential to address and respond to overlapping axes of discrimination and disadvantage, including ‘race’, ethnicity, migration status, and gender. The chapter examines the challenges faced by refugee women seeking to ‘fit’ into the inherited categories of refugee law and questions the transformative potential of the expanding body of gender asylum law. In the practice of UN human rights treaty bodies, including the Migrant Workers Committee, however, the significance of migration status as relevant to questions of racial and gender discrimination is increasingly probed, despite apparent textual exclusions from the treaty standards themselves. The Palermo Protocol itself makes reference to rights, obligations, and responsibilities arising under international refugee law.