Our History
Our Founding
Tahirih’s Impact
For over a decade, through cutting-edge legal services and advocacy, Tahirih has had a significant impact in the fight against gender-based violence:
Layli Miller-Muro founded the Tahirih Justice Center in 1997 following her involvement as a student attorney in a high-profile case that set national precedent and revolutionized asylum law in the United States. After arriving in the United States and spending more than 17 months in detention, Fauziya Kassindja, a 17-year-old girl who had fled Togo in fear of a forced polygamous marriage and a tribal practice known as female genital mutilation, was granted asylum in 1996 by the US Board of Immigration Appeals. This decision opened the door to gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum.
Following the publicity in the case, Ms. Miller-Muro received numerous requests for assistance that led her to investigate the legal resources available to immigrant and refugee women in Washington, DC. Her search revealed few organizations able to offer legal assistance to women seeking asylum or refugee status, particularly from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Using 100% of her portion of the proceeds from a book she and Ms. Kassindja co-authored about the case, Ms. Miller-Muro established the Tahirih Justice Center to protect other women and girls in need.
Do They Hear you When You Cry
“Told in Kassindja’s voice, this memoir is also a precious lesson about cultures, women’s human rights policy, and perhaps most important, faith in God and humanity. These elements, fluidly interwoven, create an incredible narrative.”
- The Washington Post
Fauziya’s Story
Fauziya Kassindja was the teenage daughter of a progressive Togolese businessman who, contrary to local custom, protected his daughters from a tribal practice known as “female genital mutilation” (FGM), “female genital cutting,” or “female circumcision.” When Fauziya’s father died suddenly, her father’s family forced her, at 17 years old, into a polygamous marriage with a man more than twice her age. As a condition of the marriage, she was to undergo the genital mutilation she had avoided.
With the assistance of her sister and mother, Fauziya escaped just hours before the mutilation ritual was to take place. Desperate to flee, she boarded the only plane leaving that night from Ghana and landed in Germany. There, she purchased a fraudulent passport and came to the United States so that she could live with relatives. She presented the passport to an immigration officer on her arrival and was honest, explaining that it was not hers but that she had used it to flee her country. She asked for protection in the United States. Instead of receiving protection, Ms. Kassindja was incarcerated in immigration detention facilities and US prisons for a year and a half. Her treatment in detention, even as a 17-year-old girl seeking asylum, was shocking. While waiting for her case to be resolved in the court system, she survived a prison riot, was tear-gassed and beaten, developed severe gastrointestinal disorders, and suffered deteriorating mental and physical health.
Her story came to the attention of law student Layli Miller-Muro, while she was working as a law clerk for an immigration attorney who was hired by Fauziya’s cousin. With only four days to prepare a legal brief in time for submission to the court, Layli utilized research that she conducted over the previous year while drafting a law journal article on the subject of whether or not a woman can receive asylum because of FGM. The topic was being hotly debated in the courts at the time because the original definition of a refugee did not clearly contemplate gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum.
Layli argued Fauziya’s case before an immigration judge who ultimately denied Fauziya’s request for asylum. Two days after the immigration judge hearing, Layli traveled to Beijing, China to attend the United Nations Women’s Conference. There, she enlisted the support of Equality Now, the Bahá’í Community, and other human rights organizations. Upon her return to the United States, she recruited the International Human Rights Law Clinic at American University’s Washington College of Law to take Fauziya’s case on appeal. At American University, Professor Karen Musalo and a cadre of committed law students took Fauziya’s case on appeal to the highest appellate court in the United States. Layli continued to work on the case as a law student.
In June 1996, Fauziya Kassindja became the first woman facing genital mutilation to receive asylum from the Board of Immigration Appeals. Her case, Matter of Kasinga, set national precedent and clearly established gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum. Her case has opened the doors for others to apply for asylum on the basis of other forms of persecution unique to women, such as rape, forced marriage, domestic violence, and forced prostitution. It also spurred the US Congress to pass a law criminalizing FGM in 1996 and fueled debate on the ritual throughout the world. Today, several countries, including Fauziya’s home country of Togo, have passed laws outlawing FGM.
Fauziya’s case attracted widespread attention and intense scrutiny by the international media. It gave cause to examine and become outraged at cultural practices like FGM and at the treatment of asylum seekers in the United States justice system. In particular, Celia Duggar, Anthony Lewis, and A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, as well as other journalists, were instrumental in bringing Fauziya’s plight and FGM itself to the forefront of the public dialogue on international human rights abuses.
Fauziya and Layli have remained close. Following her imprisonment, Fauziya lived with Layli’s family and has gone on to finish college and marry. She is currently the proud mother of three boys.
