This video from the USA is called Gays in Iraq Killed.
Translated from Dutch news agency Novum:
COC plea for asylum for gay Iraqis
Minister for Immigration and Asylum Gerd Leers (CDA) should stop returning gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender (LGBT) asylum seekers to Iraq. The gay advocacy group COC said this on Thursday. Such people have to fear for their lives in Iraq.
“The situation in Iraq is extremely dangerous and atrocities happen systematically to LGBT’s,” said COC president Vera Bergkamp. “The protection to LGBT asylum seekers from Iraq which the Netherlands currently provides is totally inadequate. We ask Minister Leers to grant them asylum collectively.”
LGBT asylum seekers, if they want to avoid being deported, must still prove that they are personally at risk in their countries of origin. For Iran there is an exception. LGBT asylum seekers from that country need only to show that they are homosexual.
What then, is the difference between Iran and Iraq? Not that human rights in general, and LGBT rights in particular, are better in Iraq than in Iran. They are definitely not. However, NATO governments like in the USA, Britain, and the Netherlands now have a conflict with their Iranian counterparts about oil etc. While, on the contrary, Iraq, ever since George W. Bush invaded in 2003, over a million people were killed, over four million people became refugees, and Royal Dutch Shell got Iraqi oil contracts, is supposedly a ‘new’ Iraq, a human rights paradise. Never mind the horrible reality.
The COC estimates that there are five to fifteen LGBT asylum seekers in the Netherlands now who are at risk of being sent back to Iraq.
The COC view got approval from Human Rights Watch (HRW). On Thursday, they sent an urgent letter to Minister Leers. According to HRW special militias are active in Iraq which hunt LGBT’s. Just in February already forty homosexuals in Iraq were killed, says HRW.
HRW reported in 2009 that death squads hunted LGBT’s. It is estimated that since 2003 some 750 homosexuals were killed in Iraq. Death-rolls with the names of homosexuals hang on walls in Iraqi neighbourhoods, according to HRW.
Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 6:34:38 p.m.
Update 12 March 2012: here.
Trouble brews between mayors and minister over deportations: here.
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Speak out for Amanpreet
The campaign to stop the deportation of Indian lesbian Amanpreet Kaur received a boost when her partner spoke to a Social Work Action Network conference in Liverpool.
It is enormously difficult for LGBT asylum seekers to be accepted. They are subjected to racist and homophobic abuse in detention centres.
Amanpreet is now out of detention. She has been traumatised by her experience and her partner D is keen to speak at more meetings to raise support.
To book her email friendsofamanpreetandd@gmail.com
Sue Caldwell, North London
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=28173
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Gay Iraqis are now eligible for asylum in the Netherlands
Thursday 12 July 2012
The situation facing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iraq is so serious that they do now qualify for asylum in the Netherlands, immigration minister Gerd Leers said on Thursday.
However, would-be refugees will have to prove they are from Iraq, the minister said in a briefing.
His decision follows the publication of a foreign affairs ministry report which was highly critical of the treatment of homosexuals in Iraq and said in some areas they are deliberately targeted by armed militias.
© DutchNews.nl
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