Doug Ireland | ukwatch.net

Gay Iranian Safe - For Now

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:19:33 +0000

In the latest protest aimed at preventing the UK from deporting 19-year-old Iranian Mehdi Kazemi to his homeland where he faces probable execution, 150 demonstrators braved hail, snow, and rain in London on Saturday, March 22, to rally outside 10 Downing Street, the official residence of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Protesters demanded that Brown’s government refrain from efforts to deport any gay and lesbian Iranians.

For the moment, at least, the Brown government has put its original deportation plans for Kazemi on hold, pending formal reconsideration.

The Kazemi case has attracted worldwide attention ever since the UK Home Office ordered him to be deported last year after his student visa expired. While in Britain, where he had been a student since 2005, Kazemi learned that his longtime boyfriend, Parham, who was the same age as him, had been arrested, tortured, and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In a lengthy e-mail to the Iranian Queer Organization describing his plight, Kazemi wrote, “If I return to Iran I will be arrested and executed like Parham.” (For background on the Kazemi case, read this reporter’s February 28-March 5, 2008 article, “ Another Iranian Tragedy”.)

After losing an internal Home Office appeal against his deportation, Kazemi fled the UK, first to the Czech Republic and then to Germany, before finally arriving, after weeks of peregrinations, in the Netherlands, where he was detained as an “illegal immigrant.” A Dutch court on March 3 ordered Kazemi returned to the UK, citing the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, under which asylum applications must be processed in the first EU country in which the petitioner made an official claim for legal recognition as a refugee.

A worldwide campaign to save Kazemi from deportation to Iran was spearheaded by the Italian human rights group Gruppo EveryOne, which also launched an online petition campaign on Kazemi’s behalf and mobilized other Italian human rights groups and the country’s Radical Party to lobby the European Parliament to take action. In the UK, the militant gay rights group OutRage! and a newly-formed committee called Gay Asylum led the fight on Kazemi’s behalf. None of the US gay rights groups, including the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, made any public statement about Kazemi’s life-or-death struggle for freedom.

TV networks CNN, ABC in Australia, the BBC and Sky News in the UK, and Italy’s RAI have all carried stories on Kazemi, as have major newspapers, including the Independent, the Guardian, and the Times in the UK, Corriere della Sera and La Republicca in Italy, and El Pais in Spain.

On March 14, the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved a resolution on the Kazemi case that had been introduced with the support of 142 of its members and 62 members of the British House of Lords. The EuroParliament resolution pointed out that the Iranian authorities “routinely detain, torture, and execute persons, notably homosexuals” and that “Mehdi’s partner has already been executed, while his [own] father has threatened him with death.”

The resolution added that “the EU and its Member States cannot apply European and national laws and procedures in a way which results in the expulsion of persons to a third country where they would risk persecution, torture, and death, as this would amount to a violation of European and international human rights obligations.” The EuroParliament stressed that the EU directive regarding criteria for refugee status “recognises persecution for sexual orientation as a ground for granting asylum.”

The resolution “appeals to the Member States involved to find a common solution to ensure that Mehdi Kazemi is granted asylum or protection on EU soil and not sent back to Iran.” More broadly, it argued that “more attention should be devoted to the proper application of EU asylum law in Member States as regards sexual orientation.”

The resolution invoked the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits the removal of persons to countries where there is a serious risk that they would face the death penalty, torture, or other inhuman treatment, as well as the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Geneva Convention.

Within hours of the passage of the EuroParliament’s resolution, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith issued a brief statement granting Kazemi a temporary stay of his deportation.

“Following representations made on behalf of Mehdi Kazemi, and in light of new circumstances since the original decision was made, I have decided that Mr. Kazemi’s case should be reconsidered on his return to the UK from the Netherlands,” Smith said.

Openly gay British MP Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democratic Party, who had campaigned on Kazemi’s behalf, told the UK’s Pink News, “I hope Mr. Kazemi will now come back to Britain [from the Netherlands] where arrangements are already in place for an urgent meeting with him, his family, specialist lawyers, and myself to prepare a new application to the Home Office.”

Hughes added, “It is becoming more and more clear that sending gay people back to Iran under the present regime is completely unacceptable.”

But it is not only young Kazemi who remains at risk for deportation to Iran. Another 12 gay and lesbian Iranians living in the UK also risk being sent back into the hands of the theocratic Tehran regime.

Prominent among them is 40-year-old lesbian Pegah Emambakhsh, who became a refugee in the UK in 2005 after her partner in Iran was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death by stoning. Her request for asylum was refused, and in August 2007 she was arrested in Sheffield and imprisoned to await deportation. But after a worldwide campaign on her behalf, she was released on September 11 last year while her appeal of the deportation order remains pending.

However, the Independent reported on March 7, Emambakhsh has lost her latest appeal.

“Ms Emambakhsh narrowly avoided deportation in August last year but only after her local MP, Richard Caborn, and other parliamentarians persuaded the Government to allow her to stay while further legal avenues of appeal were explored,” the British newspaper reported. “She says she was already on the way to Heathrow [Airport] when she learnt of her last-minute reprieve. But last month the Court of Appeal turned down her application for permission for a full hearing. Ms Emambakhsh said yesterday that she was ‘very disappointed’ by the ruling but planned to apply for a judicial review at the High Court. The Home Office has also agreed to consider fresh legal representations on her behalf.”

The UK was embarrassed when Emambakhsh was offered asylum by the center-left government of Italy’s Premier Romero Prodi, an implicit criticism of the British plan to deport her to Iran. Prodi acted after Gruppo EveryOne mobilized pressure.

Emambakhsh told the Independent, “I will never, never go back. If I do I know I will die.”

As the Independent noted in a March 6 article on the Kazemi case by the newspaper’s law editor, “The Home Office’s own guidance issued to immigration officers concedes that Iran executes homosexual men but, unaccountably, rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians.”

At Saturday’s Downing Street demonstration, OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell denounced Brown’s Labour government for “failing LGBT refugees.”

“Asylum staff and adjudicators receive race and gender awareness training but no training at all on sexual orientation issues,” he pointed out. “As a result, they often make stereotyped assumptions – that a feminine woman can’t be a lesbian or that a masculine man cannot be gay. They sometimes rule that someone who has been married must be faking their homosexuality.

Tatchell went on to say, “The government refuses to explicitly rule that homophobic and transphobic persecution are legitimate grounds for granting asylum. This signals to asylum staff and judges that claims by LGBTI people are not as worthy as those based on persecution because of a person’s ethnicity, gender, politics, or faith.”

Moreover, Tatchell noted, “The Home Office country reports on homophobic and transphobic persecution are often partial, inaccurate, and misleading. They consistently downplay the severity of victimization suffered by LGBT people in violently homophobic countries like Iran, Nigeria, Iraq, Uganda, Palestine, Algeria, and Jamaica.

And, he said, “Cuts in the funding of legal aid for asylum claims means that most asylum applicants – gay and straight – are unable to prepare an adequate submission at their asylum hearing. Most solicitors don’t get paid enough to procure the necessary witness statements, medical reports, and other vital corroborative evidence.”

It’s clear that Kazemi, Emambakhsh, and the other Iranian LGBT refugees seeking asylum in the UK still have a difficult road ahead of them.

The online petition for Mehdi Kazemi, which can be signed at the bottom, is at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/UKMADHI/. The Iranian Queer Organization’s website is www.irqo.net. OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell’s website is http://www.petertatchell.net/. The website for Italy’s Gruppo EveryOne is http://everyonegroup.com. Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/direland

London's OutRage! Leader Blocks Pakistani Strongman's Limo

Ellie Keen — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:47:03 +0000

Britain’s best-known gay activist, Peter Tatchell, confronted Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf this past weekend when the dictator arrived in London on the last leg of his European tour, blocking the general’s car with his body repeatedly to protest "the suppression of democracy and human rights" by the military strongman.

Tatchell, who this year marks the 40th anniversary of his start as an activist, undertook the protest against Musharraf even though he is still suffering the physical after-effects of the severe beating he received last year in Moscow when a crowd of fascist thugs, egged on by the police, violently broke up an attempted Gay Pride demonstration in front of Moscow’s City Hall that Tatchell had gone to Russia to support (see this reporter’s May 31-Jun. 5, 2007 article, "The Agony of Moscow Pride").

"I’ve still got cognition and physical cordination problems, loss of vision, and memory holes" as a result of the Moscow beating, Tatchell, head of the militant UK queer rights group OutRage!, told Gay City News by telephone from London. He added, "First my doctors told me I’d be alright in a month, then they said three months, and now they’re telling me these problems may never go away."

The ambush of Musharraf happened outside London’s Hilton Hotel Park Lane on January 25, as the Pakistani president’s motorcade drew close to the hotel, where he was scheduled to speak.

"To avert police attention, I stood inconspicuously at a bus stop reading a newspaper, waiting for Musharraf’s motorcade to arrive," said Tatchell. "When the police motorcycle escorts drew level, I ran out into Park Lane and straight in front of the president’s car. It screeched to a halt. I unfurled a placard protesting against Musharraf’s massacre of civilians in occupied Baluchistan. The placard read: ‘Stop Pakistan Massacre of Baluch people.’"

Tatchell got his message across to the Pakistani dictator.

"Musharraf could clearly see the placard, and he did not look pleased," he said. "His driver tried to back up and drive around me, but I ran in front of the limousine again, forcing it to halt once more. I could see Musharraf shouting something at his driver. Perhaps he feared that I was an assassin or a suicide bomber."

Then, said Tatchell, "The limo reversed again and tried to swerve past me. I blocked it for the third time. Musharraf and his colleagues looked very agitated. Eventually, police motorcycle escorts ran over and dragged me away from the bonnet of Musharraf’s vehicle."

Pulled across the road by police, Tatchell was pinned against a railing. He was soon released by police, allowing him to join the main anti-Musharraf demonstration outside the Hilton, organized by lawyers protesting the arrest of their colleagues and of Supreme Court judges in Pakistan.

This is not the first time Tatchell has personally confronted a dictator. He became a national hero in Britain when, on October 30, 1999, he and three other OutRage! activists ambushed Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe’s car in a London street and attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest of him on charges of crimes in violation of United Nations human rights conventions. Tatchell opened the car door, seized Mugabe, and then summoned police. Mugabe was not taken into custody; instead all four OutRage! activists were arrested and Tatchell was charged with assault.

Mugabe is a ruthless tyrant who has used violence and imprisonment against political opponents. He is also a notorious anti-gay demagogue — he has said that gays and lesbians "are worse than pigs and dogs" — who criminalized homosexuality and authorized his political gangs to engage in street lynchings of gay Zimbabweans.

Tatchell tried again twice to perform a citizen’s arrest on Mugabe — first in Belgium in 2001, when he was beaten unconscious by the dictator’s bodyguards, causing him serious permanent damage to one eye; and then again in Paris in 2003, when Tatchell was arrested by the French police.

As The Independent, a British daily, noted in a recent profile of Tatchell, he "was once perhaps the most execrated man in British politics. He was — to restrict ourselves to quotations from just one newspaper, the Daily Mail — ‘loony,’ ‘scabrous,’ ‘repellent,’ ‘repulsive,’ ‘sour,’ ‘humourless,’ ‘obnoxious,’ and a ‘homosexual terrorist.’"

These epithets came after Tatchell led protests that disrupted church services led by the homophobic archbishop of Canterbury and threatened to out both Church of England bishops and conservative homosexual members of Parliament who voted against gay rights legislation.

But since his attempts to arrest Mugabe, "Tatchell has variously been called ‘a national hero’ (the Sunday Times), ‘a civil rights campaigner we can all applaud’ (Sunday Telegraph), and ‘Heroic… an example to us all’ (Daily Mail)," The Independent noted.

As Tatchell marked his fourth decade of militant human rights activism with the Musharraf protest, Gay City News asked prominent British gays to assess his contribution.

"Sometimes infuriating, often imbued with a great theatrically, Peter’s work has helped keep moving forward the cause of gay emancipation enormously," according to Joe Galliano, editor of Gay Times, the glossy monthly magazine that is the largest British gay publication. Galliano added, "Peter is one of the very few campaigners to make the intellectual leap that gay rights can only properly come through better respect of human rights for all."

Brian Whitaker, author of "Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East" and a senior editor at The Guardian, a British daily that regularly publishes Tatchell’s commentaries on gay and human rights, told Gay City News, "Peter is a sort of one-man Great British Institution, even though he came from Australia — if he didn’t exist he’d have to be invented."

Whitaker went on to say, "I don’t always agree with him and sometimes he goes a bit over the top, but he’s courageous and absolutely sincere in what he does and many people admire him for that. One thing troubles me a bit — he’s such an effective campaigner that other gay people tend to let him get on with it and don’t become involved in activism themselves. They can send ten quid to OutRage!, then carry on partying with a clear conscience."

The son of a lathe worker, Tatchell began his political activity when, as a Melbourne, Australia high school student in 1967, he organized a campaign on behalf of the indigenous Aboriginal population, who faced severe discrimination at the time. Although his fellow students recognized that he was gay, he proved popular with them. Tatchell was elected student body president, or "head boy."

The next year, Tatchell joined the movement against Australia’s involvement as a US ally in Viet Nam, and led campaigns urging other young men to refuse to be drafted. In August 1971 he emigrated to Britain to escape conscription. Five days after arriving in London, he attended a meeting of the recently organized Gay Liberation Front, and within a month he began organizing its campaigns.

In 1987, he was a founder of the UK AIDS Vigil pressure group and two years later started the London chapter of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, or ACT UP. In May 1990, he attended the founding meeting of OutRage!, formed in response to police inaction after the queer-bashing murder of actor Michael Boothe. Gay journalists and writers Simon Watney, Keith Alcorn, and Chris Woods initiated the group to wage a provocative campaign of direct action and civil disobedience for gay rights. Tatchell in time became OutRage!‘s leader.

"Peter Tatchell has been a huge and towering figure in British gay politics for the last quarter of a century," Neil McKenna, an openly gay journalist and historian, told Gay City News from London.

McKenna, who authored the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed 2005 revisionist biography, "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde," which detailed the gay playwright’s little-known work as a pioneer activist for homosexual emancipation, said, "Peter has worked selflessly to bring about change, making many memorable protests. He has lived on the poverty line for three decades and has to rely on a network of support to feed himself and clothe himself. He is unique, extraordinary, principled, dedicated, and should be classified as a living national treasure, warts and all.

"My first encounter with him was when I was a cub reporter attending a Church of England General Synod which was debating the rights and wrongs of homosexuality," McKenna recalled. "Peter stood up in the public gallery circling the Synod and proceeded to denounce them. I wrote at the time that he stood up ‘like an Old Testament prophet’ and that image has stayed with me over the years. Peter Tatchell says things and does things which lots of people don’t always want to hear."

Tatchell has also been a pioneer in catalyzing international solidarity for oppressed LGBT people outside the West. In 1973, Tatchell was arrested in East Germany when he went there to help local activists stage what he says was the first public gay protest in a Communist country. In the 1980s, he traveled to Thailand to support the first wave of gay and AIDS activists in that country, and to El Salvador to highlight the violent attacks on that country’s gays and lesbians amidst a bloody civil war, during which the US gave aid to the right-wing patrons of the authoritarian regime’s death squads. He’s traveled to Malawi to protest the semi-slave labor of children on British-owned tea estates; to New Guinea to protest the Indonesian massacre of indigenous peoples in West Papua; to Latvia for banned 2006 Gay Pride observances that were violently attacked by religious extremists (see this reporter’s Jul. 27-Aug. 1, 2006 article "The Siege of Riga," a link to which appears in the web version of this article); and to Memphis to confront boxer Mike Tyson after the pugilist gay-baited heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis.

"I am often asked a question on who is my hero, whom I want to be like and I can answer for sure that Peter Tatchell is my hero, he is my ideal in fighting for LGBT rights in the world," said Nicolai Alexeyev, the courageous young Russian lawyer who has been the principal organizer of Moscow Pride. And Alexeyev went on to say, "When I just started my activist work in Russia in 2005, it was Peter who was an inspiration to me. I tried to build our work here in Russia on the principles of his work in the UK. I think he is one of the most outstanding human rights and LGBT activits in the contemporary world, who is courageous and smart at the same time. I am extremely thankful to destiny that I got acquainted with Peter. He is a person of very high standing who is totally devoted to human rights and equality for everyone."

One of Tatchell’s most attention-getting protests came at the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, where he held up a sign that read, "Charles Can Marry Twice, Gays Can’t Marry Once!"

Tatchell’s flair for attracting media attention to his causes, which draws charges he’s a publicity hound, includes writing a constant stream of articles for both the mainstream and gay press.

In 2002 he launched the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Fund to support his campaigning work around the world.

"Peter is a world leader when it comes to LGBT human rights activism," UK Gay News editor Andy Harley told Gay City News, adding that "last year when he was seriously assaulted during Moscow Gay Pride, the first group who condemned the attack, and expressed support and good wishes for a speedy recovery, were exiled Ahwazi Arabs, a persecuted ethnic minority in Iran. They described Peter Tatchell as ‘an icon in human rights.’ This speaks volumes, coming from a Muslim group that has been supported by Peter."

French black civil rights leader, scholar, and author Louis-Georges Tin, who is also the founder of the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) — celebrated in over 50 countries last year — told Gay City News from Paris, "Peter Tatchell invented a new mode for gay activism, flamboyant and pragmatic at the same time, offensive and full of humor. As the apostle of this new genre of protests, he has sacrificed nearly everything — his private life, his material comfort, his physical security — to defend human rights in England and the entire world. When will he be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he deserves?"

Ex-pat British author Christopher Hitchens, a Vanity Fair columnist, told this reporter, "Peter Tatchell has made an exemplary effort, in his life and in his writing, to give expression to a consistent and international ethic of human rights and human dignity."

And Sir Elton John recently said of Tatchell, "He’s incredibly brave… doing good work in a world where most people are too timid. He keeps sticking at it."

Peter, we salute you!

London Gay Pride Parade

Tim Holmes — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 20:24:11 +0000

Pride Parades in London, Toronto, Madrid, and Paris this year attracted millions of participants, and concern for the plight of oppressed gays and lesbians in ultra-homophobic countries was high on their agendas.

In London last Saturday, June 30, despite torrential rains and the discovery of a terrorist-planted car stuffed with explosives along the parade route through the city’s West End, dozens of thousands of buoyant LGBTers — led by the city’s mayor — marched to Trafalgar Square for a rally and concert featuring entertainment headliners.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, a member of the Labour Party left, appeared on the lead Pride float with openly gay actor John Barrowman. A leading man in many West End theater plays and musicals, and a popular figure on a wide range of BBC television shows, Barrowman — who holds joint U.K.-U.S. citizenship — is best known to U.S. audiences for his roles in the Brit import TV series “Dr. Who,” the films “De-Lovely” and “The Producers,” and the short-lived prime time U.S. TV soap operas “Titans” and “Central Park West.”

Livingstone had London’s ultra-modern City Hall draped in a huge rainbow flag to mark London Pride, and had his own special bus in the march decorated with rainbow flags, bows, and balloons.

In his remarks to the Pride rally, Livingstone — who appeared on-stage with his two small children — used his remarks to underscore the plight of LGBT people in other countries.

“This has become a good city for people of a different sexual orientation to live in.—we follow places like San Francisco and Copenhagen and Amsterdam — but let’s never forget these are just a few secure, isolated areas, in a world still awash with bigotry and hatred,” the mayor said.

“We used to see a situation a hundred years ago where gays and lesbians would be beaten to death and the police would turn a blind eye. That is still the situation for tens and millions of our comrades and sisters and brothers around the face of the planet,” Livingstone added, noting that “Peter Tatchell, who was in the march today, was viciously beaten by fascist thugs in Moscow, that’s still the situation.”

Tatchell, the founder and head of the militant British gay rights group OutRage, was severely assaulted in the attempt to hold a banned Moscow Gay Pride demonstration in front of the Russian capital’s city hall on May 27 (see this reporter’s May 31 article, “The Agony of Moscow Pride.”)

Tatchell, who has been nominated as the British Green Party’s parliamentary candidate for the university town of Oxford, told this reporter two weeks ago that he is still suffering vision problems, some memory loss, and cognition difficulties as a result of the beating to his head he received in Moscow.

“So let’s celebrate Pride in London today,” Livingstone went on to tell the Pride rally, “but let’s do all the things we can for those people in other cities who still live in fear and oppression.”

Shortly before the rally, Livingstone met with gay Iraqi refugee Ali Hili, coordinator of the London-based Iraqi LGBT group, which has a network of members and informants throughout Iraq. Iraqi LGBT has documented 350 murders of lesbian, gay, and transgendered Iraqis since the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq unleashed a lethal campaign of “sexual cleansing” by religious death squads, which are commanded by Islamic political formations courted by the U.S. and British occupiers. (The anti-gay reign of terror in Iraq has been regularly covered in these pages — for this reporter’s most recent report, see the May 3 article, “Iraqi Gay Activist Arrested, Tortured.”)

In what Hili told this reporter was the first-ever formal participation by gay Iraqis in a Pride event anywhere in the world, the Iraqi LGBT group was invited by London Pride organizers to have a booth under a tent at the rally. The group distributed leaflets to the Pride marchers and rally participants, and sold T-shirts with the slogans, “Iraqi Gay and Proud — Coming Soon, Baghdad Pride” and “You Can Save Lives, Iraqi LGBT Needs Your Help.”

The all-volunteer organization currently maintains five safe-houses in Iraq for gays who have been forced underground after threats by the anti-gay religious death squads, which have now been integrated into the Iraqi police and the Interior Ministry by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. Iraqi LGBT was forced to close three other safe-houses in southern Iraq in May due to lack of funds.

“We had over 14 of our members participating in this year’s Pride,” Hili told me. “Our group attracted lots of media attention, and our members gave many interviews to journalists.”

Hili added that, “I had a very warm welcome from Mayor Livingstone, who spoke about the terrible situation that his government and the U.S. government caused because of the awful and illegal war in Iraq.” Livingstone promised to take up the issue of the terror campaign against Iraqi gays, Hili said.

The London Pride rally was also addressed by two members of the new British government headed by Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown, successor to Tony Blair.

Openly lesbian MP Angela Eagle, who was named last week by Brown as junior Treasury Minister, was introduced to the crowd by the Labour Party’s new Deputy Leader in the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, who has also been named Minister for Women. Harman’s ministerial portfolio is also expected to include equality issues, including gay rights.

“This is my first public appearance as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and this is the first public appearance of our new treasury minister Angela Eagle,” Harman told the Pride rally. “I think we should celebrate her appointment here today,” she added, calling Eagle “my sister in government.”

Harman, who is considered a feminist, and has been identified with the Labour Party’s left wing, promised the Pride rally that the Brown government would initiate “new work in schools to tackle homophobia, more work within the police and the criminal justice system to prevent and deter homophobic crime.”

But doubts have been raised about new Prime Minister Brown’s commitment to full gay equality by gay rights campaigners and the gay press.

Last Wednesday, June 27, OutRage’s Tatchell issued a statement saying, “Gordon Brown has missed more gay equality votes in parliament than any other MP — in 13 out of 14 votes on gay equality in the House of Commons, Mr. Brown has not bothered to turn up and vote.”

Tatchell added that, “While I doubt he [Brown] is homophobic, he has failed to make any serious effort to vote in favor of gay law reform.”

A longer version of this article, covering the Pride Parades in London, Toronto, Madrid, and Paris, is available here.