A federal appeals court last week overturned rulings from immigration officials that denied asylum to Togolese student activist Messan Amen Kueviakoe.

Kueviakoe, a campus and political activist at Togo’s University of Lome, was beaten and tortured by Togolese police in 2003, and threatened with arrest after he participated in a campus protest in 2004. Fearing persecution, he escaped to the United States, later learning that the friend who had helped him obtain a visa had been killed by the government.

An American immigration judge denied Kueviakoe’s asylum petition in 2006, saying that the account of his persecution that he gave in court testimony was inconsistent with a written statement he gave earlier. The US Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the judge’s finding, but last week a panel of federal judges rejected it, finding that all three “inconsistencies” in Kueviakoe’s statements were not inconsistencies at all.

  • Immigration claimed that Kueviakoe had called the vehicle he was dragged into by police a car in one statement and a truck in another. The court found that he had used both terms interchangeably in his written statement, that he had identified the “car” as holding ten people, and that his statements had, at any rate, been translated from French.
  • Immigration claimed that Kueviakoe had indicated in one statement that he was “tortured for two days” by police, but in another said that he was only beaten for one day. The court found that Kueviakoe had consistently stated that he was beaten on the first day he was held in custody, and thrown in a jail cell with rats — and denied access to food and drink — on the second.
  • Immigration claimed that Kueviakoe had said that he was “hospitalized for two days” in one statement and hospitalized for three weeks in the other. The court found that Kueviakoe had actually said “I was hospitalized two days after my release [from jail],” and that it was the immigration judge who added the word “for” to his statement.

The appellate court vacated the previous ruling and sent the case back to immigration authorities for further review. Kueviakoe remains in the United States.