A TEENAGE girl who feared that she would be forced to undergo genital mutilation as part of an initiation rite in Sierra Leone was granted asylum by the highest court in the land yesterday.

Five Law Lords overturned decisions by an Immigration Appeal Tribunal and the Court of Appeal, which had ruled that asylum laws did not apply to Zainab Fornah, who was 15 when she arrived in Britain three years ago.

Although the Home Office had agreed that Miss Fornah could stay in Britain indefinitely on humanitarian grounds, her claim for asylum had been refused because, it was said, she did not belong to a particular social group fearing persecution — one of the requisites of the Refugee Convention.

Baroness Hale of Richmond said that Miss Fornah’s particular social group was the female members of a tribe in which female genital mutilation was almost universal. She said the answer as to whether refugee laws applied was so blindingly obvious it was a mystery as to why the case had reached the House of Lords.

Lord Bingham of Cornhill, giving the background to the case, said that the girl ran away from her father’s family village when she heard that she was to be mutilated as part of an initiation ceremony into womanhood. She had been captured by rebels and become pregnant after being raped repeatedly. Her only option had been to return to her father’s village where she again would face female genital mutilation.

Lord Bingham said in his ruling that mutilation was performed on the overwhelming majority of girls by older women in Sierra Leone, save for one minority tribe.

“The operation, often very crudely performed, causes excruciating pain,” he said. “It can give rise to serious long-term ill effects, physical and mental, and it is sometimes fatal.

“Even the lower classes of Sierra Leonean society regard uninitiated indigenous women as an abomination fit only for the worst sort of sexual exploitation.”

He said the authorities did little to curb or eliminate the practice, which had been internationally condemned as cruel, discriminatory and degrading and which was against the law in this country. Lord Bingham added: “I think it clear that women in Sierra Leone are a group of persons sharing a common characteristic which, without a fundamental change in social mores, is unchangeable; namely a position of social inferiority as compared with men.

“They are perceived by society as inferior. That is true of all women, those who accept or willingly embrace their inferior position and those who do not.” Mutilation was an extreme manifestation of the discrimination to which all women were subjected in Sierra Leone.

Lord Bingham said he found no difficulty in recognising women in Sierra Leone as a particular social group for the purposes of the Refugee Convention.

The Law Lords allowed a parallel refugee case in which the appellant, an Iranian woman who was allowed to remain anonymous throughout the tribunal and court hearings, had been refused asylum on the ground that being a member of a family where the husband had been persecuted did not represent a particular social group.

Those granted refugee status can get a job, obtain welfare as a right, receive travel documents and become naturalised British citizens.

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