News Slant	News Slant Archive

An international campaign has increased chances that an Iranian teenager who says his lover was executed in 2006 for homosexuality will not be deported from the U.K. to Iran, where the youth faces a similar fate.

On March 11, Seyed Mehdi Kazemi, 19, held in immigration detention in the Netherlands, lost an appeal for asylum in Dutch court. The British had been demanding Kazemi's return so they could then deport him to Iran.

Kazemi came to the U.K. in September 2005 to study English in London, where he lived with his uncle. In December of that year, he says lost contact with a classmate, named Parham, with whom he had been lovers since he was 15.

View our poll archive

"We used to meet everyday in school and sometimes out side school in cinema or park," Kazemi said in an email released by the Italian human rights group Everyone (Everyonegroup.com). "We started having sex about eight months after dating each other. We used to meet either in his house or my house when there was no one around. No one knew about our relationship. Everyone believed that we were best friends and nothing more than that."

In December 2005, Kazemi says Parham was arrested for sodomy, and under interrogation, named him as one of his partners. Kazemi's friend was reportedly hanged in prison in April 2006. Kazemi's father says police visited with a warrant for his son's arrest.

Nonetheless, at the end of 2007, the British Home Office rejected Kazemi's application for asylum. U.K. authorities disputed whether Iran sought the youth's arrest, whether indeed there was a boyfriend who had been executed, and claimed that gays who live discreetly in Iran do not face oppression. Kazemi fled to Germany hoping to reach Canada, but ended up instead in the Netherlands.

"Nobody's been able to document it," Scott Long of Human Rights Watch (HRW) says about what may have been the execution of Kazemi's boyfriend. Nevertheless, HRW supported the youth's application for asylum in the U.K. based on Iran's record of anti-gay repression. "The fundamental piece of evidence is that Iran does have the death penalty for homosexual conduct," Long tells The Guide.

With Kazemi headed back to the U.K., "The question is whether he will recieve a fair hearing given the record of the U.K. in rejecting asylum claims on any form of pretext," Long says.

More than 60 European MPs have signed a petition urging the U.K. to reverse its decision to send Kazemi back to Iran. The pressure and media attention have had an effect: "In the light of new circumstances," said British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on March 13, "I have decided that Mr. Kazemi's case should be reconsidered."

For more information and to help, browse to Madhikazemi.com

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com