Niels Frenzen wins asylum for senior Iraqi diplomat

USC Law Professor Niels Frenzen has won asylum for a senior official of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry who defected last year in New York.

Frenzen successfully convinced the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in New York to grant asylum status to the official, who was one of the highest-ranking Iraqi diplomats working at the United Nations when he fled to a New York police station during the 2001 Fourth of July weekend. The diplomat and his family were later taken into protective custody by the FBI.

According to Frenzen, who runs USC Law's Immigration Clinic, the official, his wife and three young children are still in significant danger. For that reason, Frenzen declined to release the diplomat's identity.

"A defection is viewed as a hostile act by the Iraqi government," Frenzen says. "Any defector in Iraq would be killed-if they're lucky. More likely, his family members would be tortured as he watched, either live or on videotape, and then he would subjected to torture and killed."

Because of the diplomat's high rank, he was allowed to live with his family in New York while he worked at the United Nations. Normally, Frenzen says, family members are kept back in Iraqi to discourage exactly these sorts of defections. There also have been murders of Iraqi opposition members in the U.S. and Europe, he says.

Although he was a part of the official government machinery for a long time, the Iraqi diplomat has expressed his opposition to Saddam Hussein's totalitarian rule.

"He believes Iraq is headed by a dictator and that human rights violations have occurred on an unfathomably high level," Frenzen says. "He was in a living nightmare and it took him most of his adult life to get out of it."

This isn't the first time that Frenzen has assisted Iraqi opposition members. Between 1997 and 2000, he represented several members of the Iraqi National Congress when they were accused by the U.S. of espionage and terrorism. They were later acquitted.