The story of gay asylum seekers - trapped in Manus Island detention centre

This photograph shows injuries Mohsen said came from a beating by Papua New Guinea immigration officers in June 2015

Mohsen fled Iran after his uncle tried killing him with a car because he was gay, promising on the next occasion that he would die.

He has ended up in the Manus Island detention centre, with the promise from the Australian gov that he will never be settled in Australia. His only choice is Papua New Guinea where being gay is illegal.

Australia has gone a step further, however. Not only do refugees on Manus Island spend years in a horrific detention center, their asylum applications are processed in Papua New Guinea instead of Australia. (Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, expected to benefit from several million dollars in aid from Australia as well as the jobs the detention center creates for Manus residents.)

This means that LGBT asylum seekers are being forced to seek asylum in a country that criminalizes homosexuality, which human rights advocates say is a direct violation of prohibitions in international law against deporting people to places where they have a well-founded fear of persecution.

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More than 100 asylum seekers in the detention center have had their refugee petitions accepted and now have the right to move to a more comfortable and open facility outside the island’s main town called the transit center, but they are refusing to relocate. Around 300 asylum seekers have decided to go back to the countries they fled, including a Syrian who was tortured by police for 20 days after he returned last year and was later injured in shelling that killed his father.

Mohsen has lived in the transit center since last spring, but he said he’s attempted suicide twice in the months since. Almost all the other queer refugees are still inside the detention center, in part out of fear of the country’s sodomy law.

That fear is so great that at least one asylum seeker reportedly refused to report two incidents of rape because he worried the Papua New Guinea police would throw him in jail.

Amir doesn’t want to take the chance of living on the outside — but unless Australia changes its policies, his only other choice is to go back to Iran.

“I cannot take the risk of living somewhere even worse than here, where those people who wanted to kill us — who killed Reza Barati — live,” he said. “If I had left for any reason other [than being gay], I’d go back the next day.” Buzzfeed