A Stitch in Haste

The State Department has published its latest edition of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices:

We take all of our human rights commitments seriously and, in our good faith efforts to meet those commitments, we value the vital role played by civil society and independent media. We do not consider views about our performance voiced by others in the international community to be interference in our internal affairs, nor should other governments regard expressions about their performance as such. Indeed, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is the right and the responsibility of “every individual and every organ of society to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance.”

Noble words that all too rarely translate into noble acts. This is the same administration, remember, that supported both repealing the First Amendment in the context of flag desecration and constitutionalizing second-class citizenship for gays.

In any case, I felt an urgent need to look up the report for Iran:

Violence and legal and societal discrimination against women, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals; trafficking in persons; and incitement to anti-Semitism remained problems.
…
On August 6, the general prosecutor ordered to close the last major reformist daily Shargh. The ban placed on Shargh in September 2006 was lifted on May 14, but the paper was operational for less than three months before being closed again. The government reportedly closed the newspaper in response to a published interview with a writer accused of being a homosexual activist.
…
In 2004 the judiciary formed the Special Protection Division, a volunteer unit that monitored and reported moral crimes. The law prohibited and punished homosexuality; sodomy between consenting adults was a capital crime. The punishment of a non-Muslim homosexual was harsher if the homosexual’s partner was Muslim. At a speech at Columbia University in September, the president publicly denied the existence of homosexuals in the country.

Why the sense of urgency?

An Iranian homosexual man who has said he will be executed if he is deported from the Netherlands has had his claim for asylum overturned.

Mehdi Kazemi has said his life is in danger if he is returned to Iran, where he says his boyfriend named him as a partner before being executed. Homosexual acts are illegal in the Islamic republic.

A Dutch spokesman said Mr Kazemi would now be sent to the UK, the first European country he entered. A claim for asylum in the UK had already been turned down.
…
Mr Kazemi, 19, said he had travelled to Britain in 2005 to study English, and learned that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy, his lawyer Borg Palm said.

After his asylum application was turned down, he fled to the Netherlands in 2006, having narrowly avoided being sent back to Iran.
…
The Dutch are refusing to consider the case. Under the EU’s 2003 Dublin Regulation, the state the applicant first enters is responsible for processing their application.

Surely it cannot be the case that some intra-EU bureaucratic quibbling could result in an innocent young man being sent to his death at the hands of “Religion of Peace” barbarians?

Right?

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