Can the bureaucracy.
I’m a little amazed that so many readers came back so quickly after the end of my hiatus, if yesterday’s comments are any indication. It’s nice to see you guys again. What isn’t nice, however, is the following headline:
Gay Iranian Fights For Asylum In Europe - CBS News
(AP) The Netherlands’ highest court rejected a gay Iranian asylum seeker’s last-ditch bid to avoid deportation to Britain, where he fears authorities will send him back to Tehran and possible execution.
In a ruling published on its Web site Tuesday, the Council of State said Britain is responsible for Mehdi Kazemi’s case, because it was there that the 19-year-old first applied for asylum.
Gay rights campaigner Rene van Soeren said Kazemi’s Dutch lawyer was considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The lawyer, Borg Palm, did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Boris van der Ham, a lawmaker who has taken up Kazemi’s cause, has tabled questions in Parliament asking the junior minister for immigration, Nebahat Albayrak, to lobby British authorities on Kazemi’s behalf. Albayrak should either urge Britain not to send Kazemi back to Iran or offer him asylum in the Netherlands, Van der Ham said in a telephone interview.
“There should be some political leadership,” he said. “I hope in Britain they will do it and otherwise we should take the boy.”
Kazemi is not expected to be deported before Albayrak has answered Van der Ham’s questions.
[...]The Netherlands relaxes its tough asylum laws for Iranian gays - virtually guaranteeing asylum to any who apply here - because of persecution they face at home. Britain, on the other hand, rejected Kazemi’s original asylum request.
Kazemi, 19, says he traveled to London to study English in 2005 and applied for asylum in Britain after learning that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy.
After British authorities rejected Kazemi’s application, he fled to mainland Europe and applied for asylum in the Netherlands.
However, because Kazemi had already applied for asylum and been rejected in Britain, the Dutch government is refusing to consider his case and insists he must be sent back to Britain. It cites the European Union’s 2003 Dublin Regulation, which declares that the member state where an asylum seeker first enters the EU is responsible for processing that person’s claim.
Tuesday’s court ruling upheld the Dutch position.
Palm said last week that Kazemi was in such despair he was on suicide watch in a center for rejected asylum seekers in the port city of Rotterdam.
Can the bureaucracy; this is someone’s life on the line. I feel like I’m watching a teenager say “Dad, can I go to the movies?” “Didn’t your mother already tell you no?” Or at least, that seems to be just how lightly courts are treating this case. I don’t care if Britain already rejected Kazemi’s asylum plea; they’re notorious for that, because the Home Office “doesn’t believe there’s a serious problem of persecution in Iran” (paraphrasing another article I read earlier today, can’t for the life of me find it now).
Right. They must be reading the same book as Iran’s president, who is still convinced that they don’t even have gays in Iran.
So because Britain’s Home Office has a stick lodged up their arses and don’t appear to be enjoying it (not enough lube, maybe?), the Netherlands - normally so tolerant, offering shelter to almost anyone who applies for asylum - won’t even bother with Kazemi’s case.
I hate politics.
How can people so blandly dismiss a person’s life on the basis of technicalities? How can so many people say “sorry, my hands are tied because of this document here, so sorry about that death thing”? I don’t even understand how lawmakers could sleep at night if they ever stopped to consider the number of lives needlessly ended by snarls of red tape and ridiculous policies.
The only hope right now, unless someone pulls some major strings, lies in one vague statement by Britain’s Border and Immigration Agency: “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.”
We’ll see where that gets Kazemi. Hopefully farther than it got Hassan Parhizkar.
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March 12th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I don’t blame the Dutch for refusing to grant assylum, their hands are tied. As soon as they pull out on one ruling of the EU, all of the sudden they put the entire house of cards at risk. The nature of the treaties that founded the EU don’t give them the “pick-and-choose” option when it comes to this stuff.
However, that doesn’t excuse the British being morons and burying their heads in the sand on this issue. They stood behind me when I wrote them a letter about a Vietnamese/British Catholic priest wrongly imprisoned by the Vietnamese government (and the British were the only ones complaining that time, the rest of the world saying “who cares”). Even the state department didn’t deign to respond to me, but the Queen’s secretary wrote a hand-written response in the royal plural to me (soooooo cool, I still have it somewhere). This, though? Nothing.
Assholes.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Having just done immigration and asylum in my politics lessons, I feel fate is conspiring to give me plenty to revise…
The British approach to asylum, in my opinion, is overly influenced by the people, who in turn are overly influenced by the media. There are insufficient words to express my loathing of the Daily Mail. Our generally right wing population see asylum seekers as foul, benefit stealing interlopers and the governement, in the interests of true representation (and covering their own stick-occupied asses at the next election) responds accordingly. Bah. Studying politics depresses me.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
You know, sometimes I wonder why I even bother to read the news, when all it ever seems to do is make me furious about one thing or another.
Oh well. I wish Kazemi luck; he appears to need it in his dealings with all the bureaucracy.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I think there is still hope in this case. I do not understand how Britain can say he is ‘not at risk’ when his lover has -already been executed- for being gay. I hope the political pressure of countries with a conscience may win out.
Also… the statement by Iran’s president that there are no gays in Iran is really the best one he could have made. Homosexuals have a little more freedom so long as they do not officially exist. The problem is, if he acknowledges homosexuality in Iran, then he will be expected to DO something about it…
March 13th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Well. Sadly this doesn’t surprise me, and the horribly cynical part of me has leapt upon the case as a perfect study for my Human Rights Journal as part of my degree.
But the cynical side is being quashed by the quietly outraged British citizen in me, the one that’s taken up Politics with Human Rights because she wants to *help* people, the one that wants to work in government because maybe she could make a difference there.
I apologise for my government. I didn’t elect them, and I don’t agree with their policies.