Not easy to screen for gay refugees

With Canada’s decision to accept only unaccompanied single male Syrian refugees who can prove they are gay, the fates of hundreds of people depend on a screener’s ability to figure out who is for real and who might be pretending to be gay to secure passage to Canada.

“We’ve all heard the stories of where (falsified LGBT refugee claims) have happened, so yes, it can happen,” said Gloria Nafziger, a Toronto-based refugee campaigner for Amnesty International.

Under Canada’s just-released plan to accept 25,000 refugees “as quickly as possible,” single adult men are disqualified unless they are accompanying their parents or can prove “membership in an LGBTI community.”

At refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, it is now the job of staffers working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to figure out which single men qualify for a life in Canada.

“Refugee board members here in Canada have said that sexual orientation and gender identity-based claims are some of the most challenging that they face,” said Sharalyn Jordan with Rainbow Refugee, a Canadian group that helps lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender refugees.

“It’s a stigmatized identity, and an identity that people have actively worked to keep secret.”

Arsham Parsi, executive director of Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees (IRQR), a Canadian group that screens LGBT Iranian refugees before recommending them to the UNHCR, says his group knows the terrain.

He remembered one man who described coming out to his parents, an event that frequently results in gay men being forced from their homes. Instead, he said his parents were “OK with it.”

“It was kind of odd, but maybe he was one of the lucky ones, so we have to look into that,” said Parsi.

Other times, claimants were rejected when they started lambasting IRQR workers as “faggots.”

Of the more than 1,300 refugees who have approached IRQR, only 17 were detected as false claimants during screening, although Parsi said he fears the rate may be higher with direct UNHCR screenings.

“It’s very easy to abuse and lie on these applications,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that Canada shouldn’t bring in LGBT refugees, but they need to be more careful and a new system brought in to support people who are in real need.”

As Parsi and other LGBT activists have noted, gay men are among the refugees most at risk — they are not only threatened in their home country, but face the possibility of being beaten or killed by fellow refugees.

Syria criminalizes homosexuality. Its penal code mandates three years in jail for what it calls “carnal relations against the order of nature.”