Iranian Christian asylum seekers claim unfair deportation
By Tom Mullen
9/5/2010 Iran, U.K. (Sunday Sun) – Two Christian asylum seekers who fled to the North claim they have been unfairly deported . . . while two gay asylum seekers were allowed to stay.
A row has erupted over the rights of two Iranian teenagers who settled in Middlesbrough and converted to Christianity in 2008.
They claimed they face violence in their Islamic homeland but their applications to stay have been refused after a judge said there were grounds for being “sceptical” over the strength of the teenagers’ religious beliefs.
The pair, aged 14 and 17, were baptised immediately after their mother’s claim to asylum was refused, arousing the suspicions of the Home Secretary of the time, Jack Straw.
However, in an appeal against the decision at London’s High Court, lawyers for the two teenagers claimed they have been denied the same rights afforded to gay men in the past.
They gave as an example a Supreme Court case last year in which two gay asylum seekers were allowed to remain in the UK and were told they had a right to be “free to enjoy themselves going to Kylie concerts and drinking exotically-coloured cocktails without fear of attack”.
In Iran’s die-hard Islamic culture both homosexuals and Christians face the harshest penalties.
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