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Sweden Streamlines Asylum Process for Gay Iranian Refugees
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The U.S. treats them like criminals; the U.K. threatens to ship them back to face persecution, even execution. But Sweden has opened its arms to gay Iranian refugees.
The story was reported July 1 by Mamba Online, as well as but other news outlets.
Rewriting its earlier policies that made sometimes difficult-to-produce evidence a mandate for extending asylum, Sweden now offers immediate asylum to openly gay and lesbian Iranians fleeing persecution in that country.
Individual claimants will still be vetted, as before, but an emphasis will be placed on assessing the level of risk a claimant faces back in Iran on the basis of his or her sexuality.
Mamba Online reported that the revision took place following a request for asylum by a young man who left Iran after he and his boyfriend had endured several arrests for being gay. The young man was allowed to remain in Sweden based on the risk he would have faced if returned to his home country.
The change seems to contradict the finding, by Sweden’s embassy in Tehran, that no gays are executed in Iran; in another development, a Swedish GLBT advocacy organization, The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL), has gained the attention of the U.N.’s Committee Against Torture with a report on a gay Iranian’s persecution at the hands of that country’s government.
In the U.K., there has been a much-criticized tendency to send gay Iranians right back to the country they are trying to escape. But some Ministers of Parliament are now bucking that trend in the wake of the highly publicized case of a gay teenager, Mehdi Kazemi, who entered the U.K. in 2005 as a student but then sought refugee status after finding out that his male lover had been hanged back in Iran as a punishment for sodomy charges.
Kazemi’s road to asylum was a tormented one filled with bureaucratic rejection and uncertainty. After his initial claim to the U.K. government was denied, Kazemi traveled to the Netherlands, only to be turned away once more.
The Netherlands cited the "Dublin regulation," a European Community law that requires member nations to handle their own asylum requests and bars other nations from undertaking the granting of refugee status to asylum seekers who have been turned away by other EU nations.
In the United States, refugees risk being treated as illegal immigrants: seized, housed in detention facilities, and summarily deported, perhaps without even a chance for their cases to be heard by immigration judges.
Such was the case for gay Iranian refugee Hassan Parhizkar, who, in an interview with journalist Doug Ireland published late last year, confessed, "I am very afraid, and so very frustrated."
Parhizkar, who was at the time jailed in a Maryland detention center awaiting deportation, continued, "My asylum request has never been before an immigration judge."
Parhizkar had lived here and paid his taxes for five years before falling afoul of the immigration system as a result of hiring a man who claimed to be an immigration attorney but was not, in fact, qualified.
Parhizkar’s older brother had immigrated before the revlution in 1979 that changed Iran from a democracy into a theocratic Muslim state; for his brother, Parhizkar’s being gay was not a problem. But for the Iranian government, it could be a reason for persecution, imprisonment, or killing.
The deportation order came down despite Parhizkar’s conduct as a citizen and business owner, and despite his owning the property on which the business was located, reported Ireland.
Sobbed Perhizkar in the interview, "I just don’t know what to do, I just don’t know what to do..."
For Perhizkar, that fear was not due to abstracts: in an affidavit, he described being pressed as a boy into a same-sex relationship by an older man who was a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Later, Parhizkar was arrested, interrogated, and beaten for his sexual activities with the Guard member.
It was after that experience that Perhizkar made his way to the U.S., where he lived for nearly ten years.
For others in Perhizkar’s situation, Sweden may now be a more attractive alternative, promising safety and liberty rather than further demeaning treatment.
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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