The Yazidi Asylum Project will host a 'blog', on which it will aim to give voice to the complex array of factual and legal issues facing Yazidi asylum seekers. Anyone wishing to contribute a short post to this blog should email YazidiAsylumProject@gmail.com
The Yazid Asyum Project would like to inaugurate its blog with a series of cross-posts from persons involved in the Project.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/05/10/the-yazidi-genocide-a-personal-perspective/
The sun greeted me as I woke on the morning of 3 August 2014. I was a researcher at the University of Duhok, 200 miles from Sinjar. It was to be a happy day as I was waiting – first for my salary, and then for Roza, my then-fiancée. Roza and I had plans to go shopping for our engagement party, which was to take place a few days later. We were excited, our future now starting to unfurl before us. We have not felt that way again since.
As Roza and I waited at the bank, uneasy murmurs started around us, and phones began to ring. My phone vibrated; a friend was calling. ISIS has attacked Sinjar, he said frantically. Time stopped as the news took hold of us. Roza phoned her sister who was at her home on the outskirts of Duhok. Her sister told her that videos were being published online of ISIS fighters in Sinjar, and that there were news of killings of Yazidis in the streets. I called another friend, a Yazidi man in a village in Sinjar, who described ISIS vehicles with banners and heavy artillery driving past his home. My mother who was in my family’s town of Bashiqa, also called to say she had heard that ISIS was slaughtering Yazidi men and taking away women. Yazidis are fleeing, she said, urgently.
I withdrew as much cash as I could and ran outside to flag down a car to take me to my mother in Bashiqa. Roza waited for a bus to take her to her family’s village outside of Duhok. We said goodbye tearfully, but quickly. We weren’t sure if and when we would see each other again. I made my way to my town, into which ISIS had not yet advanced. My entire family was put into the cars and drove to Lalesh, the Yazidi holy site near Duhok. Concerned that ISIS would advance to Lalesh, women and children were then driven by car to Duhok. Some of my uncles and myself followed on foot. Two days later, ISIS had occupied Bashiqa. My family survived, but thousands of Yazidis in Sinjar did not.
The Yazidis are a religious minority that has existed for millennia. With less than a million individuals, most of us live in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Other Yazidi communities live in Syria, Turkey, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, as well as farther afield, in Germany, the US and elsewhere. The Yazidi faith descends from the ancient religions of Mesopotamia, and today we believe in the one God. That the Yazidis are a pre-Judaic religion, and so are not ‘People of the Book’, has long motivated the political, economic and social marginalisation of our community.
At various points throughout our history, attempts have been made to wipe us out– we regularly refer to the ‘73 genocides’ that we have suffered. Prior to the ISIS attack, it was the Ottoman Turks who had made the most successful attempt. Misunderstandings of our faith are deeply rooted and it is not uncommon for people to casually – and wrongly – refer to us as ‘devil worshippers’ or ‘those who worship stones’. ISIS founded its genocidal attack on these old prejudices.
In the early hours of the morning of 3 August 2014, while I was still asleep in Duhok, ISIS fighters left their bases in Iraq and Syria and moved towards the Sinjar region in northwest Iraq, close to the Iraqi–Syrian border. Hundreds of villages are spread out around the base of Mount Sinjar, with one main town, Sinjar town, huddled at the base of the southeastern side of the mountain. Mount Sinjar, an arid 100-kilometre-long mountain range, forms the region’s heart. Before the ISIS attacks, the majority of the region’s inhabitants were Yazidis, with a smaller number of Sunni Arabs. The relationship between the Yazidi and Arab communities, who lived together in Sinjar town and in some of the other villages, was built on friendship and neighbourly relations that extended across generations.
ISIS attack on Sinjar came two months after they occupied Mosul in June 2014. It was quickly apparent that the Yazidis were their target, our existence perceived to be a stain on their so-called caliphate. Some families fled into the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Others escaped to the upper slopes of Mount Sinjar, where they were besieged by ISIS. Thousands were trapped under Iraq’s August sun, with no shade, water, food or medical care. Hundreds died on the mountain before the Syrian Kurdish forces, operating under the cover of Iraqi and American airstrikes, rescued the survivors.
ISIS captured thousands of Yazidis in their villages or on the roads during their attempt to flee. Within 72 hours, most of the villages had been emptied, with the exception of Kocho, which ISIS did not vacant of its residents until 15 August 2014. Upon capture, ISIS fighters separated Yazidi men and adolescent boys from their families. Almost all of the men and boys were executed, often by a shot to the back of the head. Their families were sometimes made to watch. ISIS fighters then moved the Yazidi women and children deeper into ISIS-controlled territory where they were registered. ISIS took note of the ages of the women and girls over the age of 9: whether they were married or not; whether they had children and, if so, how many. In short, they were pricing them.
Yazidi women and girls have been sold and resold into sexual slavery, beaten, starved and forced into labour in the homes of ISIS fighters. ISIS does not permit the sale of Yazidis to non-ISIS members, but the money to be made is enough for fighters to risk their own lives breaching this rule. Fighters sell women and children back to their families for tens of thousands of US dollars. Yazidi families are selling all they have, and borrowing more, to buy back their women and children from the men who raped and tortured them. There has been tremendous media attention on Yazidi women and girls who have been enslaved – but there has been little attempt to understand how the crimes ISIS commits against our women and girls fit into the group’s attempts to destroy our community. The Yazidi women and girls held by ISIS are not ‘sex slaves’. They are genocide survivors, and for those who did not survive, they are victims.
Boys over the age of 7 are taken from their mothers and forced into ISIS training camps, where they are indoctrinated and taught to fight. Some have died fighting on ISIS’s frontlines. It has been difficult to locate the boys and rescue them.
As ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq and Syria came under aerial attack by the US-led coalition, Yazidi captives, trapped in fighters’ houses and on ISIS military bases, were reportedly among the casualties. As the ‘caliphate’ crumbled, ISIS fighters fled, taking the captured Yazidi women and children with them. Their fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
Today, I am back living in Duhok and working as a research assistant on the LSE Middle East Centre’s project ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS‘. The project aims to build a consolidated database of Yazidi victims by age, gender, location and crime(s) suffered, using rigorous demographic techniques modelled on the methodology accepted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Our team will – with the consent of the survivors and their communities – create and organise data collected for use in accountability proceedings, identification of remains in mass graves, humanitarian interventions, community-building and broader advocacy. It is specifically envisaged, and is an integral aspect of the methodological planning, that the documentation project will play a significant role in achieving justice for Yazidis against the crimes committed against them by ISIS. The data will ground existing advocacy for accountability processes in national, regional and international courts and tribunals. Once courts or tribunals seize the cases, the documentation project’s data will provide reliable information of high probative value for use before various existing and future accountability processes. I am proud to be part of this effort.
For the Yazidis who have survived, most of us now live in displaced people’s camps, unfinished buildings and in rented accommodation in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. A small number have received asylum in Germany, Sweden, Canada and elsewhere. Others, in their desperation to find safety, have fled on dinghies to Greece. Some, including people I know, have drowned in the Mediterranean. A few have taken the risk and returned to Sinjar, which – though destroyed – is now under the control of the Iraqi central government. The region, littered with IEDs, is not yet safe. Mass graves holding the remains of Yazidis are regularly uncovered. There is a need for forensic preservation and analysis, as well as more generally for the reconstruction. Living with dignity in Sinjar remains a challenge.
The Yazidis continue to hope for the rescue and return of the women and children still held by ISIS. We hold out hope that some of the Yazidi men captured have survived and might also be reunited with their families. We have survived, for now, ISIS’s attempt to destroy us, but we remain a deeply traumatised community in need of support: psycho-social support, educational and livelihood initiatives, including those specifically aimed at increasing female social and economic independence, forensic documentation of mass graves, reconstruction, including infrastructure for potable water, healthcare and education – our list is long. But if I were to summarise, I would say the Yazidi community, displaced from Sinjar and desirous to return, needs three things: assured security, justice for the crimes committed against us and recognition of the genocide. The prejudices against our community must be uprooted and made to wither in the light. This requires the calling of the crime committed against us by its true name.
The morning I awoke thinking about my engagement belongs to a more innocent time, one to which Roza and I cannot return. This morning, I sit in front of my computer. On its screen are the names of thousands of Yazidis. They are categorised: killed, kidnapped, missing. I know they, like me, once woke up looking forward to the day ahead of them.
On Wednesday 16 May 2018, the LSE Middle East Centre will hold a discussion with Bahaa Ilyas, Roza Qaidi and Sareta Ashraph on prospects for justice and security for the Yazidis. The event is free and open to all, but registration is required.
Bahaa Ilyas is a Yazidi activist who has been in close contact with internally displaced people through different agencies and organisations since 2014. Currently, he is a researcher on the LSE Middle East Centre’s ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS‘ project.
Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi is a Yazidi activist. Since ISIS’ attacks on the Yazidis in August 2014, she has been involved in humanitarian aid and has interviewed Yazidi survivors, particularly women and girls who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS fighters, on behalf of a number of different organisations.
https://peacelab.blog/2018/10/justice-for-syria-lessons-from-innovative-tools-for-accountability
09. Oktober 2018 · Sareta Ashraph
Justice remains elusive in the case of Syria. With the UN Security Council blocked, the hope of securing justice rests with national prosecutors. The IIIM was established to organise the largely uncoordinated documentation effort, necessary to support prosecutors. But for states seeking accountability, two questions loom: what could have been done better? And what more can, and should, they do?
When it comes to pursuing justice for the Syrian people, the why has never been in doubt. The conflict, and the unrest which preceded it, have been a theatre of unrestrained brutality, a consequence of the warring parties' utter disregard for international law. Over the last eight years, dozens of entities - non-governmental, governmental, and UN-mandated - have documented violations of international law in Syria. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, established by the UN Human Rights Council in August 2011, has published over 15 reports documenting crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Syrian government as well as a number of armed groups.
While sporadic political negotiations have carefully skirted the issue of accountability, justice for the Syrian people - or at least a reckoning for those who committed these crimes with impunity - has always been held up as being non-negotiable. Layered into this is an increasingly urgent need to reassert the value of international law. Achieving justice has largely been understood as the holding of criminal trials. Consequently, the immediate and continuing focus has been on gathering and preserving potential evidence not only of the crimes themselves, but also of the criminal responsibility of those further up the chain of command.
Syria is now one of the best-documented crime scenes in human history.
Syria is now one of the best-documented crime scenes in human history. On the frontline of documentation efforts have been Syrians themselves. Facing immense danger, Syrian civil society organisations, activists, and journalists collected and preserved significant amounts of information, and continue to do so. Their work underpins efforts to secure accountability. Yet, as evidence accumulated, the Syrian war - which was drawing in an increasing number of international actors and interests - laid bare the paucity of existing approaches to international justice. With Syria not party to the Rome Statute, the only viable path to the International Criminal Court was through a UN Security Council referral. In May 2014, a draft Security Council resolution to make such referral - supported by over 65 countries - was vetoed by Russia and China. No other attempt has since been made. The idea of establishing some variation of an ad hoc tribunal for Syria never made it to a serious debate: it, too, would require Security Council consensus.
With the Security Council unable to reach agreement on referring the situation in Syria to justice at an international level, it is most likely that the sparks of accountability will find their fuel in the tinderboxes of the domestic courts, as the recent conviction of the commander of the Syrian armed group Ghoraba as-Sham in German courts shows. Yet national prosecutors, even those who work in specialised units, encounter significant challenges when it comes to investigating and prosecuting international crimes committed in Syria. Chief among them - aside from the salient matter of apprehending defendants - is the fact that they face a deluge of information collected during multi-year documentation efforts, conducted by numerous organisations with little coordination, and using different methodologies and standards of proof.
Two factors drove this multitude of documentation. First, there was little lateral communication among donors as to the types of documentation projects that they were funding, with the consequence that there were often similar projects run by different organisations, sometimes operating in the same places and targeting the same population. Second, donors tended to fund projects that were directed towards relatively short-term objectives, often with tangible deliverables (such as trainings being delivered, guidance material being produced, or testimonies of survivors being taken). Donors were less likely to fund projects that were inherently collaborative or which aimed to improve coordination practices among those undertaking documentation work on the ground.
The adverse impact of these donor practices were manifold: survivors of particular types of violations, notably torture and sexual violence, were unknowingly interviewed on multiple occasions by different organisations; interviewing practices varied widely, increasing the likelihood of re-traumatisation of survivors; there was no uniform protocol followed regarding the collection of physical evidence and open source material, potentially affecting its probative value; and organisations seeking funds were effectively competing with each other, vastly reducing the possibility of much-needed collaboration. There was also a notably gendered impact: female-led organisations, particularly those which took more collaborative and participatory approaches, received less funding. The result was a mass of documentation divided among multiple organisations, in an environment where an entrenched reluctance to discuss or share information had developed. The consequence was no one - not prosecutors, donors, or the organisations themselves - understood what the totality of the evidence of crimes was.
Limited intra-donor communication is perhaps an inevitability given the independent nature of their decision-making. This is particularly so in regard to states, as decisions over who and what they fund are often a reflection of their national values and interests. Nevertheless, international donors such as Germany can have a tremendous impact by prioritising the funding of collaborative initiatives among those undertaking documentation work on the ground. They can - and should - ensure that grantees employ properly trained staff well-versed on the protocols of interviewing traumatised individuals, and of collecting and preserving documentary evidence. They should also support - politically and financially - entities that are established to organise the vast and often unruly documentation effort.
In December 2016, the UN General Assembly established the International, Independent and Impartial Mechanism, or IIIM. Headed by Catherine Marchi-Uhel, the IIIM is charged with collecting, consolidating, preserving, and analysing evidence that could be quickly moved before a tribunal, whether national or international, with jurisdiction over crimes committed in Syria. Marchi-Uhel has stated that the IIIM is preparing case files and has engaged with war crimes investigative units of various states - including in European countries, whose courts can exercise universal jurisdiction to prosecute. The IIIM embarked upon a particularly collaborative approach in its interactions with grassroots organisations, drawing them closer not only to the IIIM, but also to each other. It has also sought to include organisations that often are not represented at meetings in Geneva, notably groups without ready access to Europe, and Syrian women's rights organisations.
The IIIM's work is likely to be particularly important to national prosecutors, notably in Germany and Sweden where the war crimes units have taken a particularly active approach. The IIIM, despite its being the most likely means of ensuring justice for the Syrian people, is funded through voluntary contributions, forcing its senior officials to go on fundraising missions and rendering the IIIM's financial stability hostage to political vagaries. It is essential, if the commitment to justice is to bear any weight, that states support efforts to move the IIIM's funding from voluntary contributions to the regular UN budget. States should consider whether to share, under agreed conditions of confidentiality, information held by its own intelligence agencies. Similarly, as donors, states are in a position to require their grantees to work effectively with the IIIM. As the Syrian conflict becomes less intense and new political realities take hold, the IIIM will need continued support from states, e.g. Germany. Finally, if justice for Syria is to be found in domestic courts, states will need to support - with resources and political backing - their own specialised investigative and prosecutorial teams.
As the world begins to grapple with the complexities of a post-conflict Syria, murmurings about the broader reach of transitional justice are becoming louder. Discussions about reparations (be they individual, collective, material, and symbolic), memorialisation, and legislative and institutional reform have been slow in coming, a likely consequence of the unpredictability and intensity of the on-going conflict.
For now, attention continues to focus on the spectre of a defendant in a dock, and a fair trial.
For now, attention continues to focus on the spectre of a defendant in a dock, and a fair trial. The crimes committed in Syria have long provided the why; the IIIM is the best answer thus far to the question 'how'. The Syrian people and their allies continue to wait impatiently for justice to arrive. When? Soon, we hope.
English Transitional Justice UN-Sicherheitsrat Syrien
Sareta Ashraph is the former Chief Legal Analyst on the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (IICI), and a former consultant to the International, Independent and Impartial Mechanism for Syria (IIIM).
http://opiniojuris.org/2018/08/15/asylum-and-the-duty-to-protect-the-yazidis-from-genocide/
15.08.18 | 0 Comments
[Sareta Ashraph is a barrister specialised in international law, and is currently focused on ISIS’s crimes against the Yazidis. Sister Makrina Finlay OSB (DPhil Oxon, Modern History) assists Yazidi asylum seekers in Germany and Melinda Taylor is an international criminal law and human rights attorney, who provides voluntary assistance to asylum seekers through Advocates Abroad. The authors are currently exploring the possibility of filing a complaint before the ECHR in relation to Yazidi asylum seekers in Germany.]
August 15 marks the fourth anniversary of ISIS’s destruction of the Yazidis of Kocho village, the last intact Yazidi community in Sinjar, northern Iraq. Investigations uncovered ISIS’s commission of almost-unimaginable atrocities: of men being killed; of women and girls, some as young as nine, being sold into sexual slavery; and of boys being forced into ISIS training camps. These horrors were committed systematically against the Sinjari Yazidis, following ISIS’s initial attack on 3 August 2014.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Commission of Inquiry on Syriadetermined that ISIS was committing genocide, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes, in its multi-pronged attack on Yazidi women, children, and men. The genocide was recognised by Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and the European Parliament, as well as by numerous States.
ISIS’s crimes against the Yazidis shocked the world. States such as Germany initially trumpeted their willingness to offer asylum to the Yazidis. In 2018, however, Yazidi asylum seekers are denied asylum on the ground that – since ISIS has, for now, lost its territorial grasp – the genocide is over and it is safe for them to return. Subsidiary protection is also withheld because, it is claimed, Yazidis can safely live in the Kurdish region of Iraq (KRI). This is despite the continuing threats to the Yazidi community, the ingrained prejudice that they face, as well as the fact that the KRI is not their home region. Most Sinjari Yazidis in the KRI live in tented IDP camps – camps which are currently at capacity, and do not provide sufficient schooling, psycho-social support, medical treatment or opportunities to earn a livelihood.
With thousands of Yazidi women and girls believed to be still held by ISIS, the genocide is ongoing. Yazidis who fled or have been rescued from ISIS live under constant threat to their security. For their group’s survival, Yazidi women, men and children need to live in an environment where they can safely practise their faith and their culture. To achieve this, States must offer meaningful protection of their right to exist as a people. Where that cannot be guaranteed in Iraq, States must interpret and apply the right to asylum in a manner which respects the right to exist as a Yazidi people, and their specific vulnerability as a group.
The particular vulnerability of the Yazidi community in Iraq
Iraq, with its limited accountability and failure to confront the roots of past and present violence, will continue to afford opportunities for bloodshed, which in turn, continues to draw support from the local population. ISIS, now in a more fragmented but still lethal form, continues to mount violent attacks against the civilian population throughout Iraq, focussing in particular on vulnerable communities.
While there was much international relief at the pushing of ISIS from Mosul and northern Iraq, this relief is not shared by the indigenous Yazidi community. Undoubtedly ISIS – as an organisation with territorial control – does not currently exists as it once did but ISIS, as a people and an ideology, remains present just below the surface of Iraqi society. As before, the Yazidis, by reason of their faith, will continue to be a target.
In its attempt to destroy the Yazidis, ISIS drew from entrenched prejudices that still exist today. It is still common for Yazidis in Iraq to be referred to as “devil-worshippers”, as ISIS also did. These prejudices are rooted misconceptions of the Yazidi faith and the fact that Yazidis are not “People of the Book” and live outside the social and cultural acceptance that Muslim and Christian communities in Iraq and in the Middle East enjoy. At the level of protection of Yazidi rights, including the right to security of person, this has pernicious effects.
The Yazidis commonly speak of having suffered, over the centuries, 73 genocides and the historical record is littered with attempts at their annihilation. The events of August 2014 are not, to them, an isolated incident. Questions continue to be raised about the efficacy with which this marginalised, maligned community has been protected by the authorities. This has included the failure to protect them from ISIS in the first place, given the foreseeability of the attack on Sinjar after ISIS seized Mosul in June 2014. In the aftermath it remains unclear whether authorities – both in the KRI and in areas directly controlled by the central Government – are prepared to protect Yezidis from future attacks.
The duty to prevent genocide and the responsibility to protect, viewed through the lens of asylum rights
Both the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1951 Refugee Convention arose from the carnage wrought by Second World War, when minorities – unanchored from the protections of a nation-State – were targeted for their otherness, not just by the engineers of genocide, but also by states, such as the United States, that chose not to provide safe haven. This refusal to accept thousands of Jewish people attempting to flee the Holocaust became a moral stain, which gave rise to the impetus to craft binding legal frameworks to take actions to protect vulnerable minorities. The link between the right of asylum and the prevention of genocide was cemented by this historical failure to secure the protection of a people by extending the most basic form of welcome to them.
For the 1951 Refugee Convention, the notion of a well-founded fear of ‘persecution’ is the touchstone for protection. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention sets out the duty to “prevent and punish” genocide, but whereas the content of the duty to punish is further fleshed out, the duty to ‘prevent’ is left hanging as a vague promise. This notion of ‘prevention’ might have remained a dead letter if not for the fresh wave of shame following the inaction of the international community in the face of the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. Yet again, the question was asked, what could we have been done, and what should we have done to prevent these horrors, and protect the victims?
The debates and resolutions that unfolded over the next decades centred around the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). While the question as to the upper-limits of responsibility hovered on the controversial question of humanitarian intervention, less attention was given to the role of asylum protection as a means for preventing genocide, and protecting its victims. The notion that the existence of a genocide can trigger a duty to intervene or take positive steps has also created a perverse disincentive for States to call a genocide a genocide, as reflected by the fact that some States have yet to acknowledge the Yazidi genocide.
If States prove resistant to incorporating asylum protection within the Genocide Convention, its obligations must be incorporated into the interpretation and application of asylum law. Persecution and genocide exist on the same continuum, and there is no empirical bright line as to when the systemic persecution of people is likely to mutate into a genocide. It follows, therefore, that effective genocide prevention strategies must be harmonised with State obligations to protect against persecution. Concretely, the notion of ‘persecution’ must take into account the dynamics of collective harm that results from genocide, and the right to collective protection as a mechanism for pre-empting the extinction of the identity of the group, as such.
Asylum policy and the particularities of the Yazidi ethno-religious group
At present, the political pendulum in many States has swung towards a more restrictive and individualistic approach to asylum law, which promotes the denial rather than acceptance of asylum seekers. This narrow approach, which focuses on the right to exist free from serious harm, whilst ignoring the bigger picture of the right of a vulnerable group to exist “as such”, fails to protect the right of the Yazidis to exist as a people, and not just as an atomistic fragment, divorced from the element as a whole.
For centuries, Yazidis had managed to secure their continuing identity and existence in what was often a hostile environment by marrying only from within the Yazidi community: Yazidi children must have two Yazidi parents and conversion to Yazidism is theologically impossible. They also secured their existence by having large families and living in regions that are geographically isolated. With the destruction of Sinjar, the death of thousands of young Yazidi men, the sexual violation of young Yazidi women, and the scattering of Yazidis across the KRI, Europe, and further abroad, all three of these survival strategies are under threat. When taking into account how to provide for the survival not only of Yazidi individuals but of the Yazidis as a people, it is essential for Yazidi asylum seekers to be considered as a group: assessing them simply as individuals risks sundering them from their people and their faith.
Durable solutions must ensure the integrity of the people at risk. Individuals need to be accepted and protected as a community, and the notion of a safe and sustainable return to the country of origin needs to take into consideration the extent to which the ‘return’ allows the ‘population’ to maintain their identity as a group. A forced return to an IDP camp in a different geographic area might be consistent with the ‘safe’ return of the individual, but not the sustainable return of the protected population, and the protection of a people ‘as such’.
The focus of asylum protection is on the risk of future persecution, as predicted on the basis of past conduct. Genocide – in either its active or nascent ideological form – seeks the annihilation of the group. Genocidal attacks against individual Yazidis are thus clear indicia of the risk of persecution faced by the group. The assessment of the future risk faced by individual Yazidis cannot, therefore, occur in a vacuum, but must take into consideration the experience of the group as a whole.
The designation of the Yazidi people as a ‘vulnerable group’
The corpus of asylum law has evolved over the last half-century to recognise that within the genus of persecuted minorities, there is a further need for specific minorities to be designated as a ‘vulnerable group’ in order to protect against intersectional layers of discrimination. This open-ended category of groups has been constructed on the basis of the heightened protections set out in other legal instruments, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention against Torture, and includes children, and survivors of torture, trafficking and gender-based violence. The vulnerability designation requires States to exercise specific care to ensure that the asylum process is compatible with the groups’ protection needs, as concerns the manner in which the interviews are conducted, the provision of appropriate medical and psychological assistance, and the type of accommodation that is provided.
Within the context of the Council of Europe, the notion of ‘vulnerable groups’ also corresponds to a heightened degree of human rights protection, and has been held to encompass a ‘people’ as such. In Oršuš and others v. Croatia, the ECHR explained that although the case concerned the situation of fourteen individual applicants, it was necessary to take into account the “specific position of the Roma population” who “as a result of their history…have become a specific type of disadvantaged and vulnerable minority”.
This line of reasoning applies with even greater force to the Yazidi people. The genocide in which started just over four years ago marked the extreme intensification of a continuum of persecution, and historical vulnerability caused by their otherness. The Yazidis exist as a majority in no state. In the absence of political power, their survival, as a group, rests exclusively on their ability to enjoy effective protection as a minority group, which can exist as such. The synergies between the 1951 Refugee Convention and Genocide Convention, as set out above, also speak to the need to classify the Yazidi people as a ‘vulnerable group’ that requires a heightened degree of protection in order to ensure their right to continue to exist as a people.