Man Whose Wife Was Sterilized in China Wins Asylum

Men whose wives were forcibly sterilized under China’s coercive population control policies are entitled to political asylum in the United States, the federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled Tuesday.

The groundbreaking ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals could greatly expand the number of people able to stay in the United States on the grounds that they were persecuted by China’s population policies. It applies to cases in California and eight other Western states.

“Involuntary sterilization irrevocably strips persons of one of the important liberties we possess as humans: our reproductive freedom,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a Carter appointee, wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel.

“Therefore, one who has suffered involuntary sterilization, either directly or because of the sterilization of a spouse, is entitled,” without having to prove anything else, to refuge in this country, he wrote.

Judges Kim M. Wardlaw and Richard A. Paez joined his opinion; both are appointees of President Clinton.

Tuesday’s ruling is the latest by the 9th Circuit dealing with the domestic legal consequences of China’s population policies.

Starting in 1981, China enforced a strict policy limiting families to one child. Forced abortions, sterilizations and IUD insertions became widely publicized features of that policy.

Although the policy has been relaxed in at least some parts of the country, monetary penalties and other forms of coercion continue to lead to involuntary abortions and sterilizations in China, U.S. government officials say.

In 1996, Congress passed a bill granting refugee status to up to 1,000 people a year who can prove that their nation’s population control policies coerced them.

The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has been flooded with asylum claims since then, and there has been little consistency to the resolution of the cases, said Susan Greenhalgh, a professor of anthropology at UC Irvine who is an expert on China’s population policies.

The latest 9th Circuit ruling was particularly unusual because it was the husband who applied for asylum, she said. The wife is still in China, and there is nothing in the decision about her current situation.

The plaintiff in the case, Quili Qu, came to the United States in 1997 on a valid visa for a businessman. In 2001, he applied for asylum.

Qu said he and his wife had married in China in 1978. They were denied a permit to have a child because Qu’s family was thought to be affiliated with “counterrevolutionary elements as a result of its elders’ support of the pre-Communist regime and adherence to Christian beliefs,” the court said.

When Qu’s wife became pregnant, she fled to the countryside in order to avoid a forced abortion. She gave birth in 1979 and left the baby with her mother.

Three years later, Qu and his wife received a birth permit. The wife waited a few months and then lied to officials, saying she had just become pregnant. She went back to her mother’s village and told officials a year later that she had had a child there and left him with her parents.

The officials became suspicious and went to the parents’ home. When they discovered that the child was 5, not 1, “the Chinese bureaucrats became enraged,” the court said. Qu and his wife were criticized at public meetings, were forced to return the certificate entitling them to one child and subsidies they had received.

Then, in 1985 when Qu was at work, a neighborhood committee “found Qu’s wife, bound her, and took her to a hospital,” where she was involuntarily sterilized.

When Qu sought to stay in the United States, a federal immigration judge turned him down. The judge said that Qu had no valid fear of persecution because his wife already had undergone the operation and “can’t be sterilized again.”

The Board of Immigration Appeals upheld that ruling, noting that Qu had remained in China for 11 years after the sterilization.

The appeals court disagreed, describing forced sterilization as a “permanent and continuing act of persecution.”

The government had no immediate comment on the ruling. Qu’s lawyer did not return calls seeking comment.