August 21, 1999
Jerome Hule, PANA Correspondent
NEW YORK, US (PANA) - Adelaide Abankwah, a young Ghanaian woman whose two quests for asylum generated much controversy and public attention, is now free to stay in the US without harrassment.
After two years of wallowing in detention, Abankwah, 29, has been granted her petition for political asylum by the US Board of Immigration Appeals.
Abankwah arrived in the US in March 1997 and was arrested at the John F. Kennedy international airport in New York for being in possession of false identification papers.
But the young woman called for help to get those papers because she fled her country in order to escape genital cutting, which her family imposed on her.
It was on the grounds of such fears that she filed for political asylum, claiming she would be lynched if she returned to Ghana.
But a US immmigration court turned down her request, sparking an appeal process that went to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The court had ruled in her favour more than a month ago but it was the Board of Bmmigration that had to give the final world on her case. That decision came on 13 August.
But as the woman waited for the due process of law to take its course, women's rights groups took up her case campaigning for her freedom and political asylum.
Early this year, some lawmakers from New York, including a US senator, also joined the case in the interest of Abankwah.
Newspapers and magazines also splashed her case, thus arousing much public interest across the US.
In her first press conference on Thursday since regaining freedom, Abankwah thanked all who suported her cause.
''There are really no words that can express the way I am feeling. I am so happy to be free. I don't have to worry about being deported or dying in jail,'' a New York Times report quoted her Friday.
Abankwah said that she intended to go to college, work part time and volunteer for Equality Now, a group that is campaigning against genital cutting.
She now lives with a fellow Ghanaian, Victoria Otumfuor-Neequaye, a Pentecostal minister.
''When I first saw her, we cried together because she was in that deplorable condition. God has seen us through. I am so very proud of her,'' the minister said of Abankwah, who is one of few women who have been granted political asylum in the US based on fleeing the horror of genital mutilation at home.