A report in the Washington Post (8th March 2005) reveals that a United States Court granted right to asylum for victims of China's sterilization policy. Men whose wives were forcibly sterilized under China's coercive population-control policies are entitled to political asylum in the United States, a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled.

The groundbreaking ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit 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. "Involuntary sterilization irrevocably strips persons of one of the important liberties we possess as human: our reproductive freedom," Judge Stephen Reinhardt 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.

The plaintiff in the case, Quili Qu, came to the United States in 1997 on a visa for a businessman. In 2001, he applied for asylum. Qu said he and his wife, who is still in China, had married in 1978. They were denied a permit to have a child because Qu's family was thought to be affiliated with "counter revolutionary elements" as a result of its elders' support of the pre-Communist regime and adherence to Christian beliefs," the court said. Qu's wife gave birth in 1979, leaving the baby with her mother. Later, a birth permit was granted. When Chinese officials discovered that the child was 5, not an infant, "the Chinese bureaucrats became enraged," the court said. A neighborhood committee "found Qu's wife, bound her, and took her to a hospital," where she was sterilized. When Qu sought to stay in the United States, a federal immigration judge said Qu had no valid fear of future persecution because his wife had undergone the operation and "can't be sterilized again." The appeals court disagreed, describing forced sterilization as a "permanent and continuing act of persecution."