Crossing borders between international refugee law and international human rights law in the European context.

Drawing from documentary and qualitative data and by taking people fleeing homophobia as example, this article looks at the role that international human rights law ('IHRL') may play in complementing and in intersection with international refugee law ('IRL'). In the last decades, IRL and IHRL have increasingly taken into account sexual minorities’ needs. Despite not being one of the grounds of persecution under the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, sexual orientation has been identified as a relevant factor for the recognition of refugee status for more than twenty years. In parallel, IHRL has evolved to a point where sexual minorities are more fully included within the scope of rights and freedoms set forth in universal and regional human rights treaties, especially via the prohibition of discrimination. Yet, strange as it may seem, this simultaneous evolution has not always led to a fruitful intersection between IRL and IHRL, even in terms of interpretation despite what the Law of Treaties requires. On this basis, it argues that IHRL may, firstly, raise obligations to facilitate the access of these claimants to asylum determination procedures and, secondly, inform the notion of persecution used in IRL more comprehensively than it currently does in practice.