A Critical Analysis of UNHCR’s Protection of Refugee Women.

The global population of refugees is almost twice the women population; consequently, international protection regimes against refugees continue to despite the gender-related risks that they are subjected to. Although the international organisations have become more conscious of gender-based violence, inequality, and exclusion as the essential aspects of protection, there exist significant gaps between the promises of the policy and the real experiences of refugee women. This paper is a critical review of the role of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to protect refugee women by framing practices of the UNHCR within feminist refugee studies and the critical humanitarian governance literature. With the agreements of secondary academic materials, the policy documents of the United Nations, and reports of the international human rights organisations, the study asserts that the gender protection framework of UNHCR is structurally confined into the legal constraints of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the state sovereignty predominance, donor-pressured interests, and lax accountability measures. As much as it is true that UNHCR has made normative advances by rendering gender mainstreaming, with Age, Gender, and Diversity framework, the study still suggests that the gaps in implementation have continued to render refugees vulnerable to violence, marginalisation and lack of agency. The study suggests that structural and legal reform to provide significant protection to refugee women is necessary, but not just to increase the scope of humanitarian policy by contributing to the discussion about governing refugees.