U.S. Circuit Court Of Appeals Hears Asylum Case Of Women Who Underwent Genital Cutting In Guinea

Main Category: Women's Health / Gynecology
Also Included In: Sexual Health / STDs;  Medical Malpractice / Litigation
Article Date: 02 May 2008 - 8:00 PDT

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A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Tuesday "grew increasingly impatient and sometimes angry" while listening to arguments from government lawyers in an asylum case concerning three women who underwent female genital cutting in Guinea, the AP/Staten Island Advance reports. The panel will determine if the Board of Immigration Appeals was right to deny asylum to the women and allow for their deportation, the AP/Advance reports.

Two of the women have been in the U.S. since 2003 and the other since 1992. All three will remain in the U.S. while the case is pending, the AP/Advance reports. One of the women testified that she feared her daughters would face female genital cutting, also known as female genital mutilation and female circumcision, if she was forced to return to Guinea. The woman's lawyer said that as many as 95% of all women in the country are subjected to the practice. The attorneys for the women also said that women who undergo genital cutting often suffer from psychological trauma, complications during childbirth and painful menstruation.

The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of Law submitted a brief to the court stating that female genital cutting was "usually just the beginning of an extended course of threats to life or freedom that women who have been victimized by the act can expect to face." In the brief, the group compared the practice to forced sterilization, saying that genital cutting "entails permanent and continuous harm."

Jessica Sherman, a lawyer for the Justice Department, argued that there was no evidence in the cases of the three women that the same people who harmed them before would do so again. The panel questioned whether it was fair for the government to return the women to Guinea because they could not suffer further persecution. The panel added that other asylum cases based on other forms of persecution did not require the individuals seeking asylum to prove that the persecution could be repeated. "Supply me any case in which a well-founded fear of persecution was not sustained because the same leg couldn't be amputated or the same organ removed," Judge Rosemary Pooler said.

Pooler said that there was evidence in the appeals record that genital cutting was often one of a series of abuses aimed at controlling women and their sexual freedom. The judges ordered the lawyers to submit written records to show if the government had ever come upon an asylum case that was denied on the same grounds, the AP/Advance reports (Neumeister, AP/Staten Island Advance, 4/29).

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