The Reading Blog

In the editorial “A Victory for Women,” today’s issue of The New York Times noted that, “Three women from Guinea won a court victory in Manhattan this month in their struggle to win asylum as victims of the barbaric form of persecution known as female genital cutting. In doing so, they have shined a light on the urgent need for consistent humane policies that treat women’s rights as fundamental human rights.” According to the three U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit judges who made this ruling,

… the Board of Immigration Appeals, the highest immigration tribunal in the country, had committed “significant errors” and ignored its own regulations in denying asylum to the women, Salimatou Bah, Mariama Diallo and Haby Diallo. It ordered the board to reconsider the cases. Among other disturbing misjudgments, the panel said, the board had wrongly assumed that the women were safe from future persecution because their genitals had already been cut. The board had likened the women’s injuries to the loss of a limb — a bad thing but not something that happens more than once.

… the board had [also ] erred by failing to consider the women’s risk of persecution by other means. In societies where genital cutting is endemic, beatings, rape, forced marriage and sex trafficking are commonplace, too.

One of the judges separately noted that “…the ritual mutilation of girls to promote chastity and thwart sexual desire is a perpetual injury. It is performed without anesthesia, often with dirty instruments, and leads to disfigurement, severe complications and lifelong trauma.’

The New York Timeseditorial rightly observed that, “The United States has seldom been shy in lecturing others in the world about human-rights abuses. But it has zigzagged between compassion and confusion in its handling of women seeking refuge from genital cutting.” The editorial called for “swift action” by Michael Mukasey, the U.S. Attorney General, and the Board of Immigration Appeals, “…to affirm the rights of these women.” Isn’t it time that we had, “clear, consistent refuge policies for women who have suffered such an appalling breach of their basic rights”?

I wonder if the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals would have applied the decision standard they used for these mutilated women if the issue had been whether or not to grant assylum to men who had been castrated (afterall, that happens only once too, right?) or had undergone other forms of severe genital mutilation.