EU battle over anti-genital-mutilation plan

A BATTLE to ensure female asylum seekers are not sent back to countries that practice female genital mutilation has blown up at the European Commission.

The commission is drawing up a list of countries considered so safe that people can be sent back to them with only a cursory consideration of their asylum claim.

The first list put forward included the African country Mali, where almost all young girls suffer the severest forms of genital mutilation.

But in an effort to head off a rebellion among commissioners yesterday, Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini agreed to exclude Mali.

Afterwards, he said: “We will exclude countries where there is a concrete risk of female genital mutilation. We are concerned about the situation in Mali, so it will not be on the list.”

However, a number of female commissioners are demanding all countries should be excluded where the practice is legal or where it is practised despite being outlawed.

Amnesty International estimates that 130 million women are mutilated in this way with an additional two million every year. The procedure, usually carried out on girls aged between four and eight years frequently without anaesthesia, cuts away part or all of the genitalia making intercourse and birth impossible without being cut.

The argument was led by Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes from the Netherlands, Communications Commissioner Margot Wallstrom from Sweden and Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel from Denmark.

However Mr Frattini, a former Italian Justice Minister, is opposed to the principle of automatically defining countries were FGM is practiced as unsafe.

The practice is widespread in northern Africa, where 95% of women in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Mali are mutilated as are substantial numbers in Somalia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Uganda, Pakistan and parts of India.

Canada immediately grants asylum to women where there is even a slight risk of FGM if they are returned to their home country, while the US in 1997 defined FGM as a human rights violation.

There is a total ban on the practice in Britain, but frequently young girls are sent back by relatives to their ancestral country for the procedure.

Justice Minister Michael McDowell in the Dáil in February quoted reports that in Nigeria women’s groups did not consider FGM was a reason to apply for asylum and that women could seek to be relocated to areas of the country where it was not practised.

A decision on the EU list has been postponed for two weeks while Commissioner Frattini and External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner work on it.

When the list is agreed, it will operate in all EU countries including Ireland, though each country will be able to add further countries to it.

NGOs are opposed to a list system saying that such a rigid system poses dangers to asylum seekers.