Gay Iranian Is Denied Asylum in Netherlands

March 12, 2008— -- Mehdi Kazemi, a gay Iranian teenager fighting to stay in Europe after his boyfriend was reportedly executed in Iran, has lost a plea for asylum in the Netherlands and will be sent back to Britain, where he could face deportation to Iran, the teen's uncle told ABC News.

"Indeed a decision was made to deport him to the U.K.," his uncle Saeed, who lives in Britain, told ABC News. He said he had spoken to Kazemi just moments after the verdict was announced.

"He was very, very disappointed," Saeed said of his nephew's state of mind.

Kazemi, 19, came to Britain to study in 2005. He has said he intended to return to his country until he learned that his boyfriend in Tehran, whom he had been dating secretly since he was 15 years old, had been arrested for sodomy and hanged, according to Kazemi's lawyer.

Kazemi appealed for asylum in Britain, writing in a letter accompanying his request, "I wish to inform secretary of state that I did not come to the U.K. to claim asylum. But in the past few months my situation back home has changed. The Iranian authorities have found out that I am a homosexual and they are looking for me."

He continued, "I cannot stop my attraction to men … If I return to Iran I will be arrested and executed like [my boyfriend]. Since this incident … I have been so scared."

A British court denied Kazemi's request in 2006 on the grounds that Iran does not systematically persecute homosexuals.

But human rights organizations dispute that.

"They have no human rights, it's very dangerous," Arsham Parsi, 27, the executive director of the Iranian Queer Organization, told ABC News in an interview last week.

In September 2007, Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made headlines when he proclaimed in a speech at Columbia University, "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country."

Kazemi, terrified that he would be handed over to Iranian authorities after his application in Britain was denied, fled to the Netherlands. For the past few weeks, he was being held in detention there while a Dutch court decided whether he should be sent back to the U.K.