a concept which recognises that persecution can be enacted against members of a section of the population (a ‘group’) that is suffering oppression or is threatened as a whole in its home country according to one of the criteria defined in the Geneva Convention of 1951 to an extent that the members of such a group are not only covertly or potentially at risk, but quite tangibly and imminently requiring thus a certain intensity of persecution to warrant the general assumption of the individual persecution of each group member, irrespective of whether an individual has indeed been the victim of such persecution. In any case, whilst a group may be persecuted, an application for international protection must be examined on an individual basis in the Member States, and not all together as one group.