CEDAW/C/55/D/35/2011 Convention. A gender-sensitive approach should be applied at every stage of the asylum process under the latter instrument, which defines a refugee in article 1A(2) as someone who has a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. A State party must interpret that definition in line with the obligations of non-discrimination against women and substantive equality under article 2 (a) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. States parties are required also to ensure that each of five grounds enumerated in the Refugee Convention is given a gender-sensitive interpretation. Persecution, while not defined in the Refugee Convention, is widely understood to refer to threats to one’s life or freedom, serious human rights violations or other serious harm. 2 Such other serious human rights violations and harm would include those proscribed by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, including rape as a serious violation of women’s human rights. 10. Under article 2 (c) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, a State party must establish legal protection of the rights of women on an equal basis with men and ensure through competent national tribunals and other public institutions the effective protection of women against any act of discrimination. This means, in the present case, that the author’s request for asylum on grounds of sexual violence and political persecution should be determined by an asylum system that has a thorough understanding of the particular forms of persecution and human rights abuses that women and girls experience because of their sex or gender. 11. With regard to the author’s political persecution, the State party submitted “that the Refugee Appeals Board accepted the author’s evidence, including her involvement in FLN activities, but found that the author’s political activities were of limited nature” (para. 4.3) and “assessed that the author would not be at risk of assault in case of return to Burundi” (para. 6.5). Based on such formal categorization of the author’s political activities as of limited nature, the State party ignored that fact that women are, in general, underrepresented at the high level of political parties and that women’s political activity may not always look like male political activity or may not be equally valued in the male-dominated political environment. The State party’s authorities also failed to assess in a non-discriminatory manner the risk of the author’s future political persecution or gender-related persecution or whether the author could benefit from State protection, taking into account all relevant facts relating to her claim of political persecution and sexual violence, i.e. that members of FLN, including the author, were attacked, killed or imprisoned by government forces; that her house was the subject of a grenade attack; that the police were asking for the author and her husband (para. 2.6); that her former neighbours who were members of the Conseil national pour la défense de la démocratie had promised to kill her if she returned home; that she was raped by three men armed with knives and that out of fear she did not report the events to the police “given that she was trying to hide from them” (para. 2.4); and that she feared that she might be subjected to rape and other bodily harm upon being returned to Burundi. __________________ 2 18/20 See the Guidelines on International Protection: gender-related persecution within the context of article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention and/or its 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (HCR/GIP/02/01). 13-43086