Wired’s Threat Level blog reports on an asylum case that was almost decided using evidence gleaned from the Wikipedia.

Lamilem Badasa of Ethiopia entered the U.S. with a fake Italian passport.  She then applied for asylum.  As part of her asylum request, she attempted to prove her true identity using a document known as a laissez-passer.

The Department of Homeland Security provided a Wikipedia page (!) indicating that a laissez-passer is a one-time, one-way document containing information which is not independently verified by the issuing government.  An Immigration Judge (IJ) ruled that Badasa had thus not proven her identity.  The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), while stating that it did not “condone or encourage” the use of the Wikipedia in immigration proceedings, nevertheless dismissed Badasa’s appeal because it felt that the Immigration Judge’s ruling “was supported by enough evidence to find no clear error.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit didn’t buy that argument, and remanded the case back to the BIA:

“[W]e do not know whether the IJ would have reached the same conclusion without Wikipedia, or whether (and, if so, why) the BIA believes that the IJ’s consideration of Wikipedia was harmless error, in the sense that it did not influence the IJ’s decision.”

Wired obviously thinks this is yet another example of how dim-witted the Department of Homeland Security can be.  We all know that Wikipedia pages can be unreliable — heck, my daughter can’t cite them in her college term papers.  But that’s not my point here.  My takeaway is that the court system worked properly in this case.  It wasn’t pretty, but eventually an appeals court said, “Whoa … you need to show us some hard facts here.”  The adult supervision came through when it needed to.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
on September 03, 2008 - 10:29 am

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