If Mehdi is deported to Iran he will be put to death within a month

by Diana Armstrong

Mehdi Kazemi must not be sent back to Iran. I am certain that if he is he will be dead within a month. I know this from personal experience of Iranian attitudes to homosexuality.

My son is Iranian and he’s gay. He is lucky, I am English, so he has the right to live in the UK.

He was 17 when he told me he was gay. He wanted to tell his father, (my Iranian ex-husband) but his father seemed to have guessed already and started making threats on our son’s life.

Reasoning with my ex-husband was impossible, despite the fact that our daughter had died two years ago in a car accident, and our son was now our only child. I had hoped that the pain of losing our daughter might make him determined to overcome his intolerance of our son’s sexuality, but it didn’t.

My ex husband is a man who was educated in England and married to an English woman. He has experienced a life which is not Islamic fundamentalist.

If he can feel like this about his own son, even though he is not a fanatic of any kind, what chance do gay men and women stand when confronted with a government refuses to accept their existence in its own country - and then executes them?

My son will never go to Iran - how can he go to a country where it is a crime, punishable by death, to be gay?

How can anyone stand by and let Mehdi’s life be the payment made in order to show that we will not allow people to “abuse” our immigration laws.

Diana Armstrong

Thursday, March 13, 2008

If Mehdi is deported to Iran he will be put to death within a month

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