Australian Immigration Daily News

The refugee crises and what it means for the LGBTQI Asylum Seekers

In the times we live in, there are more people forcibly displaced by situations beyond their control. War, poverty, and climate change have caused more migrations than both World War I and World War II combined and in 2015, around 60 million people were forced to become refugees.

Many people among these refugees belong to the LGBTQI class (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Intersex), and Australia’s immigration policies directly create the conditions which increase the trouble these people have to go through during their migration. These conditions increase the harassment, exclusion, humiliation and violence against refugees who belong to the LGBTQI group.

It has to be kept in mind that these people are already coming from places where they have faced rejection and hurt by the general attitude against the LQBTQI community and have come to foreign lands to escape war, terrorism, and trauma.

An estimated number of 2.7 billion people are living in countries that consider homosexuality to be a crime and countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and Yemen still have a death penalty for homosexual acts.

Australia’s PNG Solution ensures that all refugees who attempt to travel to Australia by boat are incarcerated in detention centres in countries including PNG, Manus Island, Nauru and Cambodia, and these countries are known for extreme poverty, cases of police violence, and human rights abuses, which make these mandatory detention prisons dangerous for the refugees.

There have been cases reported where women and children disclosed sexual assaults by the detention centre security guards.

Despite this fact, the Australian immigration minister declared that refugees arriving by boat are never going to be settled in Australia, and Australian officials have recently refused New Zealand’s offer of resettling around 300 refugees from Manus Island and Nauru.

Threats faced by LGBTQI detainees

Detention in off shore prisons is particularly dangerous for LGBTQI people as they have been forced to declare their sexual identity to immigration officials when they were applying for refugee status.

As the Australian government claims that this is to increase the speed of their asylum seeking process, the immigration officials have asked the asylum seekers to confirm their sexuality by identifying Western LGTBQI icons to demonstrate an ongoing connection with the LGTBQI groups.

It is important to understand that these people have come from places where they faced persecution  on the grounds of being ‘different’ and revealing their sexual identity might be difficult for them, since the chances of them being deported still remain high.  If their application for asylum is accepted, they will be resettled in Papua New Guinea, and not in Australia, which is still dangerous as homosexuality is a crime in PNG.

Penalty for gay sex in PNG is 14 years of imprisonment and therefore, even if gay asylum seekers exit asylum detention there is a possibility that they will be under threat because of homophobic laws.

Staff on Manus Island has been reported to threaten the asylum seekers of disclosing same sex sexual activity to PNG police, and there has also been the distribution of anti-LGBTQI material under the claim that they are mandated to do so and the material is to educate them about the intolerance of homosexuality in PNG.