It is an incident that has entered Home Office folklore, gaining almost mythical status as an illustration of our broken asylum system. And it remains all too relevant today.
The episode involved an asylum seeker from an African nation who claimed, like so many, that he could not be sent back to his homeland because he would be targeted for being gay.
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – Article 3 of that 75-year-old treaty, to be precise – prohibits ‘torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. It is frequently used by asylum seekers to launch appeals on the basis that their personal circumstances would expose them to harm in their home countries.
Every such claimant is expected to provide convincing evidence to show they are, indeed, at risk. However, many try to game the system by claiming to be gay when they are not.
‘There was a guy who claimed asylum on the basis he was gay and, as part of his case, he produced a photograph of himself with his arm around another man,’ a Home Office source tells me.
The applicant was duly granted asylum. Yet it subsequently came to light that the person he had his arm round was his brother.
My source says this is just one example of many where an applicant petitioned for the right to stay in Britain on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence.
Indeed, only this week it emerged that an Albanian asylum seeker, who was refused permission to stay in the UK despite claiming he was gay, had then gone on to marry a women and applied to return to Britain to join his new wife.
The issue of asylum seekers weaponising British law by falsely claiming to be gay has even been raised by the human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, pictured last year
The issue of asylum seekers weaponising compassionate British law by falsely claiming to be gay has even been raised by the human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who has taken the extraordinary step of issuing a warning to the Home Office.
His human rights group, the Peter Tatchell Foundation, used to receive only a handful of small personal donations online each week, but is suddenly getting up to 30 a day, accompanied by a similar surge in the numbers signing up for a weekly newsletter, Tatchell has revealed.
The donations all come from men from Pakistan, where homosexual acts are imprisonable offences.
It appears, he says, that some may have been collating documentary evidence of their contact with the group in a bid to back up their asylum claims.
Mr Tatchell wrote to Home Office’s director-general of UK Visas and Immigration, Joanna Rowland, in January: ‘For the past 18 months, we have noticed almost daily donations of less than £3, sometimes as many as 30 in a single day.
‘It is apparent many of these donors are likely asylum applicants. We have also received emails from some of these “donors” requesting membership cards or letters for their asylum applications.’
Mr Tatchell stressed that he supported genuine claims but his organisation offers support to asylum claimants only after strict checks have been carried out.
‘We have no proof of wrong-doing. In our experience, asylum fraud is rare – and we intend to help keep it that way,’ he told the Mail.
He added: ‘These waves of 15 to 30 small donations have raised our concerns. They correspond to people who soon afterwards request Peter Tatchell Foundation membership cards and letters of support for their asylum claims. We are gathering more evidence and continue to update UK Visas and Immigration.’
Mr Tatchell is hardly a slouch when it comes to advocating for gay rights, having been central to a number of organisations in the field for more than 50 years.
Peter Tatchell in 2004 when attempting to make repeated citizen’s arrests of then Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe
The personal courage he displayed in the early 2000s when attempting to make repeated citizen’s arrests of then Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe won him admirers beyond his usual backers. When he speaks out in this way, something is clearly wrong with the system.
And, sadly, these are not the only examples of asylum seekers attempting to manufacture a spurious gay identity as part of their bids to stay in Britain.
In March, the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber ruled on a case involving a Bangladeshi man who came to Britain as a student in February 2022 and claimed asylum four months later.
The court ruling set out the case as follows: ‘In summary, he asserts that he fears harm upon return to Bangladesh on account of his homosexuality.
‘Since being in the United Kingdom, he claims to have engaged with the homosexual community by way of attending gay events, posting on Facebook and joining [sic] the Eagle gay club.
‘He disclosed his sexuality to a friend of his father’s, who lives in Wales, as he was being placed under pressure to marry a woman of his father’s choosing.
‘That information was passed on to his father and, in turn, his home village in Bangladesh. He fears both his father and Bangladeshi society.’
The Home Office had found his claim to be gay was ‘not credible’ and, in a later appeal, a judge reached the same conclusion.
The unnamed judge found it particularly difficult to give credence to a statement from a friend of the family in Bangladesh that the applicant’s sexuality was ‘big news in the village’.
‘I find that it is not credible that the appellant’s family would have broadcast the fact the appellant was gay as this would have been a matter of deep shame to them,’ the judge said, noting the family friend’s statement appeared to have been ‘written to order’.
The Bangladeshi man later brought another appeal but lost again.
It is not known whether in the meantime he was receiving taxpayer-funded support, or if he can now be removed from this country as a failed asylum seeker.
Another notorious case from January made a mockery of the protections offered to gay people facing hardship.
A convicted Zimbabwean paedophile was allowed to stay in Britain under Article 3 of the ECHR because he would face ‘substantial hostility’ if he was sent back to his home country.
On this occasion, there was no dispute that the man was attracted to males, even if they were children.
But it is difficult to believe that the originators of the European Convention expected its protections to be deployed in favour of someone who had been jailed for more than five years for sexual offences against minors and the distribution of indecent underage images.
In December, the Mail on Sunday revealed how a Jamaican man who raped a sleeping woman at a party had been allowed to stay after his lawyers argued he was bisexual and would be put at risk if deported.
In that case, the Home Office said that, since his arrival here 23 years ago, there was zero evidence of bisexuality, only of relationships with women.
Even so, the tribunal judge bizarrely accepted he was likely to have been bisexual and blocked his deportation – a decision later upheld when the Home Office appealed to the upper tribunal judges.
And two years ago Saheed Azeez, from Nigeria, won asylum after claiming to be gay – despite having three children by three women.
It is all part of a growing trend. Rapidly rising numbers of asylum seekers are being allowed to stay in Britain on the grounds of their homosexuality.
There were 2,133 successful claims last year, up from the 762 which were granted in 2022. In 2019 the figure stood at just 475.
Saheed Azeez, from Nigeria (pictured), won asylum after claiming to be gay – despite having three children by three women
Home Office sources revealed in 2020 that allegations of homosexuality putting a person at risk had become one of the main arguments made in last-minute legal challenges to deportation.
Then, as now, the way immigration lawyers use late appeals – often on ‘human rights’ grounds – was under intense scrutiny. Some claims are submitted in the final seconds before a deportation flight is due to take off.
There was a particularly contentious series of deportation flights to Jamaica in 2020, aimed at removing foreign criminals as well as failed asylum seekers.
Sir Keir Starmer – a human rights lawyer by background and, at the time, a candidate in the Labour leadership election to replace Jeremy Corbyn – signed an open letter, which demanded ‘all future charter flights must be suspended’.
The tendency towards taking asylum seekers’ claims at face value – rather than recognising that some will say anything to avoid being put on a plane home – is a persistent flaw among the far-Left and, it seems, the man who later became our Prime Minister.
In parallel, there have been waves of asylum seekers who have made other spurious claims, including those who claim to be Christian in a bid to avoid being sent back to a country where they will face anti-Christian prejudice – the so-called ‘pray to stay’ phenomenon.
A decade or so ago, there was widespread concern over sham marriages being entered into for similar reasons.
In 2012, Anglican vicar Brian Shipsides, then 56, was jailed for four-and-a-half years for his role in about 200 sham marriages that took place in an east London church.
He admitted one count of conspiracy to facilitate unlawful immigration. He had presided over the marriages at All Saints Church, Forest Gate between December 2007 and August 2010, Inner London Crown Court heard.
Brian Shipsides (pictured in 2012) was jailed for four-and-a-half years for his role in 200 sham marriages in east London
Similarly, in 2015 a bogus couple were arrested at a register office after the groom had to ask his wife-to-be’s name during a meeting with the registrar. Both fake lovers were later jailed for immigration offences.
Other asylum seekers claim to be dutiful parents when the evidence suggests they are nothing of the sort and rarely see their children.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp tells me: ‘Peter Tatchell’s evidence makes it clear that illegal immigrants are embroidering claims to be gay in order to win asylum.
‘This is analogous to all the other claims we have seen from people who allege they have converted to Christianity, with gullible vicars providing letters of support after someone turns up at church a few times.
‘Our system is far too soft and accepts claims without solid evidence. Asylum seekers who put forward these spurious, concocted stories are taking is all for fools.
‘It is very likely that this is yet another immigration scam supported and enabled by immigration advisers. The whole system needs radical reform so it can no longer be exploited by people who are often illegal immigrants.’
In September 2023, the then Tory home secretary Suella Braverman said that some asylum seekers ‘purport to be homosexual in the effort to game our system, in the effort to get special treatment’. She added: ‘That’s not fair and it’s not right.’
It led to her being castigated by some gay groups for making what they described as ‘deeply disturbing’ comments which, they said, ‘question the legitimacy of LGBTQI+ people claiming asylum in the UK’.
Many Left-wing pressure groups and other woke advocates refuse to countenance the possibility that any claim based on homosexuality could be fictional and depict any attempt to address such abuse as being reactionary or even homophobic.
The most important aspect of Mr Tatchell’s intervention is that it demonstrates the scale of concern at this kind of asylum exploitation. The more the abuse escalates, the more people will be willing to question its injustice.
The trans rights debate was stopped dead in its tracks last month – after years of campaigning from women, gay and straight – when the Supreme Court ruled the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.
Perhaps that watershed judgment offers hope that common sense can prevail. And that, one day, only gay people facing genuine persecution will benefit from asylum protections that are rightfully set out in our laws.
