Court blocks deportation of Fijian asylum-seeker

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Jannif Ali came to the Bay Area on a visa with his family in 1989 and applied for political asylum, saying soldiers in his native Fiji had beaten him and dynamited his house.

Immigration officials took 14 years to schedule an interview with Ali and then ordered him deported, saying State Department reports showed that conditions in Fiji had improved.

But a federal appeals court said Friday that immigration judges hadn't considered evidence of Fiji's treatment of minorities since the latest military coup, in 2006, and had looked only at general conditions in the island nation - not the situation of someone like Ali who had been persecuted under a previous military regime.

If U.S. authorities conducted an up-to-date analysis, there is a "reasonable likelihood" they would conclude that Ali would face persecution in Fiji, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. It returned his case to the Justice Department's immigration courts for further review.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/18/BAIA1IER0L.DTL