By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The chances that battered women could win asylum in the United States have improved with a little-publicized order Attorney General Janet Reno signed in her last hours in office.
"We're thrilled, but we're not out of the woods yet," Wendy Young of the private Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, said Tuesday.
And in another last-minute decree, Reno left to the Bush administration a decision on asylum for a former Algerian politician charged with having links to terrorism, an immigration lawyer says.
In the first case, Reno threw out an immigration board's 1999 decision to deny asylum to Rodi Alvarado Pena, who fled to the United States and sought refuge from repeated and savage beatings by her husband, a former Guatemalan soldier. Reno said the board should reconsider the case, but not until final passage of a new rule proposed last month by the Justice Department that would make to easier to justify claims of gender-based persecution.
Women's advocates and refugee advocates have been pushing for more than a year for a reversal of the case.
"This was as bad as it gets - being dragged all over the house, bloodied, raped," said immigration lawyer Michael Maggio."The abuse she suffered was so egregious - and the evidence that the Guatemalan government didn't do anything about it so equally obvious - if anybody could qualify for asylum on this basis it would be her."
Advocates say that since the denial of asylum to Alvarado set a precedent against such claims, its reversal could open the doors to other women persecuted because they are women.
Alvarado has been living in the United States while her appeal and a review of the case by Reno were under way.
The proposed rule change allows victims of domestic violence to be considered members of a"social group," one of five categories in U.S. immigration law along with religion, race, nationality and political beliefs.
In fiscal year 2000, some 49,000 people from nations around the world applied for U.S. asylum for a variety of reasons. There is no breakdown on how many applied because of domestic violence, but the total for people persecuted because of membership in a social group numbered a few hundred, officials say.
In the second notable case that she dealt with last Friday, Reno also indefinitely stayed an immigration boards' decision to grant asylum to Anwar Haddam, an Algerian Islamic leader whose case has gone through several reversals, said Maggio, an attorney for groups that opposed asylum for Haddam. The Justice Department did not return a phone call seeking confirmation of the action.
A physics professor and one-time candidate for parliament, Haddam and his fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front party won the first round in Algeria's first-ever multiparty elections in late 1991. But the army canceled the second round in early 1992 when it became clear the Salvation Front would win.
The party was banned and many of its members were jailed or went into exile.
Haddam had been living in the Washington area from 1993 through 1996, as a representative of the parliamentary wing of the party and awaiting a decision on his asylum request. Then, he was jailed pending deportation in December 1996, when his asylum was denied on"secret evidence" that alleged his links to terrorist activities in the North African nation. Neither Haddam nor his lawyer has been given access to this evidence.
He was kept in detention for more than three years, then given asylum in May in what INS days later called a mistake, revoking it. He was granted asylum anew by a judge later in the year and released from jail. Reno reviewed the decision and stayed it. It was that stay that she extended Friday, Maggio said.
