Against the odds, a gay Uzbekistan man who ‘lived with terror everyday’ won asylum in the US last month for fear that he would be persecuted for his sexual orientation if he returned to his country.
The US Department of Homeland Security issued the grant and reported a high-risk of torture and abuse.
The Uzbek man, who could not be named out of fear of continued persecution said he was arrested and abused by police for having an intimate relationship with a man.
‘Even after I escaped the country, the police have tried to track me down at my parents’ home, and I know if I had to return, my life would be in danger,’ he said.
Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic took on the man’s case after he was referred by the LGBT-focused immigration organisation, Immigration Equality.
Clinic Director Suzanne Goldberg and a team of four had been working on the case since January and spent months preparing the case with interviews and researching country conditions.
‘There is a great deal of anti-LGBT persecution in the world, and relatively few LGBTI asylum cases are granted,’ she said.
Goldberg said LGBT-people faced the same problem shared by all asylum seekers – proving the authenticity of their claim.
‘Asylum officers may be more sceptical of LGBT claims than others because they cannot “see†who is gay and who is not or because they harbour negative judgments against LGBT people,’ she said.
Circumstances have been reportedly grim for the LGBT community in the post-soviet republic with tales of relentless mal-treatment.
Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic team member Erin Meyer said Uzbek police allegedly entrapped gay men and threatened jail time if they couldn’t pay off police with bribes worth thousands of dollars.
Uzbekistan is one of some 80 countries around the world that still criminalises homosexuality with ‘homosexual conduct’ punishable by up to three years’ incarceration.
Goldberg said that the success rate for asylum seekers in the US was below 10 per cent.
Last year saw the largest rise in forcibly displaced asylum seekers to 43 million people worldwide, the highest level since the mid-1990s.
Over 12,000 asylum claims had been lodged in the US for this year alone while in Australia, authorities received around 25 asylum claims a day between January and April this year, totalling over 3,000 according to the UNHCR.
In June, a Pakistani man was declined asylum by Australia’s High Court after an appeal by the federal immigration minister Chris Evans.
While Pakistan still prosecutes homosexual men, the flaws in the man’s argument outweighed his appeal.
From 2004, he had been married to a Pakistani woman with four children in the United Arab Emirates but later developed an attraction to two men in the UAE.
However the tribunal was not convinced that the man was homosexual or fearing persecution after he returned to Pakistan, despite potential harassment.
Benn Dorrington
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