Mick Hartley

The more publicity this disgraceful case gets, the better:

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….

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.