Karen Musalo directs the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies and the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic. The center’s mission is to protect the human rights of refugee women and girls by advancing gender-sensitive asylum laws, helping advocates represent women in need of protection, and preventing these refugees from being forcibly returned to the countries from which they have fled. Among the top scholars in the field, Musalo has written numerous articles on refugee law issues, with a focus on gender asylum, religious persecution, and conscientious objection as bases for refugee status.

Musalo has helped to shape the evolving jurisprudence of asylum law both through her scholarship and through her litigation of landmark cases. She was lead attorney in Matter of Kasinga, which established that a successful claim to asylum may be based upon fear of female genital cutting. Kasinga continues to be cited as an authority in gender asylum cases by tribunals from Canada to the United Kingdom to New Zealand.

Today, Musalo represents Rodi Alvarado, whose case is likely to determine whether women fleeing domestic violence in countries where there is a failure of state protection may qualify for political asylum in the United States. Musalo was featured in the PBS documentary Breaking Free: A Woman’s Story, which depicts Alvarado’s case.

Widely recognized for her innovative work on refugee issues, Musalo was the first attorney to partner with psychologists in her representation of traumatized asylum seekers, a practice that has since become standard. She edited the first handbook for practitioners on the impact of culture on credibility in the asylum context. Her current work examines the linkage between human rights violations and migration, with a focus on the phenomenon of femicides in Guatemala and its relation to requests for refugee protection from Guatemalan women.