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Many young girls have fled Africa to escape the practice of female circumcision. One such girl

An administrative agency acted unlawfully in denying refugee status to a 15-year-old Liberian girl attempting to avoid female circumcision on the grounds that her mother’s refugee application had been refused, the Supreme Court concluded. In its decision, the Supreme Court deemed female circumcision to correspond to the “persecution” grounds for granting refugee status and demanded a close separate review of this factor in the girl’s refugee application.

In the appeal of a case filed by the girl, identified by the initial “D,” against the director of the Seoul Office of Immigration to demand that the refusal of refugee status be overturned, the Supreme Court’s third division under Justice Hon. Park Bo-young announced on Dec. 17 that it was reversing the original ruling against the plaintiff and remanding the case to Seoul High Court.

D was born in a refugee village in Ghana in Dec. 2002 and applied for refugee status in South Korea after traveling here with her mother in Mar. 2012. In applying on D’s behalf, the mother claimed that if her daughter returned to her land of citizenship in Liberia, she would be forced to enter the traditional Liberian group Sande Bush and undergo circumcision. The mother also claimed to have fled before her own circumcision by Sande Bush, which resulted in the slaying of D’s grandfather.

In its decision, the Seoul Office of Immigration made no mention of the possibility that D would be forced to undergo circumcision if she returned.

“As [D’s mother] is not recognized as a refugee, [D] is deemed not to qualify as a refugee either,” the office said in its decision to deny D refugee status.

The Supreme Court argued that an administrative agency “may only make a decision on whether to grant refugee status as a rule after reviewing whether a case meets the criteria for refugee status as determined by the law, and may not cite other unrelated standards alone as grounds for refusing to acknowledge refugee status.”

“The administrative agency’s decision in denying refugee status to the plaintiff [D] simply because her mother was not recognized as a refugee was an illegal action with no basis in the law,” the court explained on the reason for its decision.

The court also said that female circumcision “involves the removal or infliction of damage to part or all of a female’s genitals for reasons of tradition, culture, or religion rather than medical purposes and is an act that causes direct harm accompanied by extreme pain and violates human dignity.”

“As such, it meets a condition for recognition of refugee status, namely ‘persecution inflicted due to membership in a particular social group,’” it concluded.

“The administrative agency and court must review objective data on [D’s] family, regional, and social situation and examine whether there is an acknowledged individual and concrete risk of [D] being exposed to female circumcision if she returns to Liberia,” the court said.

The first and second courts hearing the case ruled against the plaintiff, arguing insufficient grounds for recognized a “sufficiently well-grounded fear” of persecution. The court in the first trial declined to recognize refugee status on the grounds that it “appeared [D] may receive adequate protection from her own government as the domestic situation in Liberia stabilizes.”

The court in the second trial claimed it could “not be argued that no review was conducted for [D] as a minor, as her mother’s interview statement was taken.” As a reason for denying the appeal, the court said that D “could move to a region of Liberia where they do not practice female circumcision.”

By Yeo Hyeon-ho, senior staff writer

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