Gay teenager is facing gallows as his asylum bid is rejected

Times Online - UK

A gay Iranian teenager faces deportation from Britain and execution in his home country after a Dutch court refused to hear his asylum claim.

Mehdi Kazemi, 19, will be forced to return to Britain, where his asylum application was rejected last year. He is then expected to be “removed” to Iran where his boyfriend was hanged two years ago for sodomy.

The ruling will put the Home Office under renewed pressure to reassess his case — or face the possibility of sending a young man to his death. The department’s own guidance concedes that Iran executes homosexuals but rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians.

The Times uncovered Foreign and Commonwealth Office papers in November that showed that the British Government regularly challenges Iran about its gay hangings.

One gay Labour peer said yesterday that he could not understand the Home Office’s refusal to recognise that homosexuals are routinely persecuted in Iran. Lord Alli told the House of Lords: “Homosexuality is illegal in Iran and is punishable by death. This young man’s partner was hanged at an early age for simply being gay.

“The Home Office’s position is that gay people can return to Iran safely providing they are ‘discreet’. Heaven knows what that means,” he said.

Mr Kazemi came to London to study English in 2005. He applied for asylum after discovering that his former boyfriend had been charged in Iran with sodomy and had been hanged. Legal papers claim that his boyfriend was questioned about sexual relations he had with other men and, under interrogation, named Mr Kazemi as his partner.

In a letter to Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, Mr Kazemi wrote: “I did not come to the UK to claim asylum. I came here to study and return to my country. But . . . my situation has changed. The Iranian authorities have found out that I am a homosexual and they are looking for me. I cannot stop my attraction towards men . . . I was born with the feeling and cannot change this fact . . . If I return to Iran I will be arrested and executed.”

His case was refused last year and he fled to the Netherlands where he had hoped to reapply for asylum. Yesterday Borg Palm, his solicitor, said that the court had ruled that he could make a claim only in Britain. “The case was about whether he should be sent to Britain or not — which country was responsible for his asylum case,” he said.

According to human rights campaigners more than 4,000 gay men and lesbians have been executed in Iran since the revolution in 1979.

In November the FCO released papers to The Times about the use of the death penalty for the “crime” of homosexuality. They showed that Mohsen Yahyavi, a senior Iranian politician, told British MPs at a peace conference last May that homosexuals deserved to be executed or tortured and possibly both. President Ahmadinejad, questioned by students in New York in September about executions of gay people, dodged the issue by suggesting that there were no gays in his country.

Gay rights groups condemned Britain’s handling of the case. Ben Summerskill, from Stonewall, said: “There is incontrovertible evidence that lesbian and gay people face danger in Iran and we will be raising this once again with the Home Secretary.”

Peter Tatchell, from OutRage!, said: “Mehdi has fallen foul of an EU regulation which stipulates that an asylum seeker can only claim refugee status in their first country of arrival.”

A Home Office spokesman said that he could not comment on an individual case, but added: “The Government is committed to providing protection for those individuals found to be genuinely in need, in accordance with our commitments under international law.We examine with great care each individual case before removal and we will not remove anyone who we believe is at risk on their return.”