CEDAW/C/55/D/35/2011 12. Under article 2 (c) of the Convention, States parties must ensure that women are not discriminated against and that gender-related forms and grounds of persecution are addressed during the asylum procedure. Gender-related forms of persecution are those that are directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affect women disproportionately. Gender-related claims to asylum may intersect with other proscribed grounds of persecution, such as membership of a particular social group or political opinion. In refugee status determination proceedings, the author has to provide relevant factual information, while the decision maker should ask further relevant questions and apply this information to the legal framework. As such, it should not be incumbent upon the asylum seeker to use in her asylum claim words such as “discrimination based on sex” and/or “gender-related persecution”. Rather, the asylum seeker should provide facts or substantiate her claim with regard to discrimination based on sex and/or gender-related persecution. The author did this and that should be sufficient for the State party to assess her claim fully in respect of those aspects. 13. Under articles 2 (c) and 2 (d), the State party should also put in place asylum procedural safeguards to ensure that women’s claims are properly heard and assessed, especially because women may not know the motivation or reasons for the acts perpetrated against them, or the identity of their perpetrators, as in the present case. In refugee status determination proceedings, because of the particular vulnerability of asylum seekers, the burden of proof is to be shared between the examiner and the asylum seeker. 3 It should be noted that there are discrepancies between the facts as presented by the State party and the facts as presented by the author. For example, the State party submits that “the Board found no evidence that the rape committed by three unknown men related to her FNL activities” (para. 4.3) and “that at no time during the domestic proceedings did the author assert that the rape was an instance of politically motivated persecution” (para. 6.2). On the other hand, the author submits that she “told the Board that she had been raped by three men, whom she thought were members of the militia affiliated with the ruling party, but that she had no proof of that” (para. 5.8). She also claims that “the State party appears to be of the opinion that ‘rape is just something that a woman has to suffer in situations of conflict in Africa’ and that women cannot be subjected to political persecution” (para. 5.9). The author also further clarifies (para. 7.2) that: The fact that she replied in her interview before the Refugee Appeals Board that she did not know her attackers does not mean that she was approached only by coincidence, but rather that she did not know the identity of her aggressors. She reiterates that she was under the clear impression that her aggressors had participated in the violent attack against her town. After raping her, one of the offenders wanted to kill her, but another member of the group intervened, claiming that what they had done to her was ‘worse than death’. The men then allowed her to go. The author adds that that approach is a means of spreading terror among female members of the opposition, so as to deter further political activism. __________________ 3 13-43086 See Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (January 1992 — re-edited) (HCR/IP/4/Eng/REV.1), paras. 190 and 196. 19/20