LONDON, March 25, 2008 – The British Government is currently failing gay refugees, Peter Tatchell told a rally in Whitehall, outside the Prime Minister’s official residence 10 Downing Street.

Over 120 protesters braved hail and rain on Saturday to demand that gay Iranian asylum seeker, Mehdi Kazemi, be granted refuge in the UK.

They also urged asylum for the Iranian lesbian refugee, Pegah Emambakhsh, and an estimated 12 other gay Iranians who are at risk of deportation back to Tehran.

There were calls for a “fundamental reform” of the way the Home Office treats LGBTI asylum applicants.

“The British government had ordered Mr Kazemi to be deported back to Iran,” said protest speaker Peter Tatchell, spokesperson for the LGBTI human rights group OutRage!.

“Following worldwide protests, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith MP, has agreed to review Mehdi’s case.

“While there is no guarantee that this review will result in him being allowed to stay, we are hopeful that he will be permitted to lodge a fresh asylum claim and that this will result in Mehdi being given refugee status in the UK,” he emphasised.

Saturday’s protest was sponsored by Middle East Workers’ Solidarity and the National Union of Students LGBT campaign, with the support of OutRage!

The protest's three main demands were:

■ Don’t send Mehdi Kazemi back to Iran

■ Iran’s homophobic laws violate human rights

■ Give the victims of homophobic persecution the right to settle in the UK

“There needs to be a fundamental reform of the way the Home Office processes LGBTI asylum applications,” Mr. Tatchell told the rally:

“The government is currently failing LGBTI 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.


“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.

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

“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.

“The Home Office has failed to take action to stamp out anti-gay abuse, threats and violence in UK asylum detention centres.

“Some LGBTI detainees report suffering homophobic or transphobic victimisation, and say they have failed to receive adequate protection or support from detention centre staff,” said Mr Tatchell.

Source: Outrage!, London (24th March, 2008)

Tags: Gay refugees, asylum system to protect lesbian

A comprehensive but painstakingly slow revision of the English language is being accelerated because of the speed with which important words are changing their meaning. After working through four and a half letters in 10 years, staff at the Oxford English Dictionary Online are to focus on "urgent" examples of transformed terms such as "computer", "genetic" and "gay".

The decision has been taken in the face of an increasingly pressing queue of commonly used words and the vast new resource of references available on the internet. Staff examining the historical usage of the word "European" have found 13,000 online references from 18th-century texts alone, a haul which it would have been impractical to harvest in the era of searching books and manuscripts.

John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, who heads a team of 60 editors on the project, said: "Our team has also become more and more experienced as we go along, in what is the first complete revision of the dictionary since the first edition was published in 1928."

The task began in 1997 with a budget of £34m, starting at the letter M. Online entries showing the original definition and the modern revision have so far been finished as far as the middle of Q.

The first batch of revised words outside the stately alphabetical progression has gone online this month, with users able to see both the 1928 version and the updated definition.

Source: Martin Wainwright, The Guardian (Monday March 24 2008)

Tags: Gay dictionary, Gay word changes