A 20-year old gay Iranian, Mehdi Kazemi, who had been studying in the UK suffered the loss of a boyfriend who was hanged in Iran for his homosexuality. He asked for asylum in the UK and was denied. He then fled to the Netherlands, and Dutch courts also rejected his plea.
However, the European Union has actually stepped up and has done what its member states could seemingly not and provided Kazemi with a human rights waiver from the deportation order he was facing in the UK.
The Human Rights group, Every One, played an enormous role in this effort — and what I hope is done at this point is that Mehdi’s case becomes a template for managing persons in similar kinds of distress.
Does anyone think that either the Dutch government or the British government would have survived the pubic protests had Kazemi been deported to Iran and immediately executed?
This is time to revisit the EU member state’s practice of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Deport. But bravo from this side of the Atlantic to the increasingly impressive European Parliament.
— Steve Clemons
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