Court Opinion

ID: 9489681
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:21:23.50421+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:39.554077
License: Public Domain

REINHARDT and HAWKINS, Circuit Judges,
specially concurring.
Judge Kozinski’s concurrence contains much that is personal and that reflects his experience as an immigrant who came to this nation in order to seek freedom and a better way of life. The concurrence focuses on a particular form of authoritarianism with which Judge Kozinski is most familiar. Given the circumstances of this case, it is certainly appropriate for him to express his own individual views on the subjects of Communism and the Cuban government in a separate concurrence.
There is one part of the concurrence, however, which is not personal and which we feel compelled to join. Judge Kozinski emphasizes “the importance of independent judicial review” in asylum cases. We agree wholeheartedly. In the absence of judicial review, grave injustices could take place for which our government and our people would have to bear the moral responsibility. These injustices might, as Judge Kozinski suggests, ordinarily be few in number, but, in some periods of history they could be many indeed.
Those of us who are familiar with the infamous episode in which we turned away hundreds, if not thousands, of Jewish refugees crowded on the decks of the Saint Louis, many of whom subsequently perished in Hitler’s concentration camps, understand the importance of treating the problem of political and religious refugees with sensitivity, compassion, and care. On some occasions, government agencies may not take the most objective view of particular cases, for reasons ranging from partisan or political concerns or biases to the human consequences of an unmanageable or overburden-some caseload. Courts may err also, but the additional level of review is a safety mechanism designed to catch at least the most egregious of the inevitable human errors.
As Judge Kozinski’s concurrence makes clear, judicial review of asylum cases may mean the difference between life and death for refugees from tyranny or from religious or racial persecution. As a nation that proclaims its strong belief in the importance of human life and political freedom for all peoples, that should be enough to persuade us of the necessity of judicial review.