Looks matter in Iran - Mherdad Jawwdat finds long hair and make-up invite suspicions of homosexuality

New Internationalist, May, 1999

A British High Court case will decide whether homosexuals are a specific group under the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and therefore can claim asylum. Mherdad Jawwdat is bringing the case to court after a special immigration adjudicator said he could return to Tehran so long as he changed his looks, wore his hair short and avoided wearing make-up on the street. Charles Bennett, the adjudicator, ruled that even if the police in Iran recognized him as someone they had accused of being gay, `they will see him with short hair and conclude (to their thinking) he has seen the error of his former ways, or turned from what they will consider his former wickedness, or that he has simply "grown up" '.

Jawwdat's lawyer, Mark Henderson, told the High Court that the Iranian authorities regarded gays as `corrupt parasites', a `tangible manifestation of Westernization' and that homosexuals are punished by torture and even death. Mark Watson of Stonewall, the gay-rights lobby group, says: ` The Nazis thought gays were a separate social group and persecuted them. If the Nazis recognized them as a separate social group, then we should have no difficulty in recognizing them as such.'

CIS NEWS