A statement from Naz and Matt Foundation
The last couple of weeks have been difficult ones for many of the people we support.
The BBC’s recent investigation (“Legal advisers help migrants pose as gay to get asylum”) reported on a small number of individuals and advisers allegedly helping people fabricate LGBTQI+ asylum claims. Where that kind of behaviour genuinely exists, it should be investigated, and those responsible held to account. We say that clearly and plainly.
But the picture those headlines leave behind is not the picture we see. Not in our support group. Not in the phone calls with members of our community. Not in the emails that come in from people still too frightened to use their real names.
For nearly twelve years, many of the people who have found their way to our Foundation have been gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, intersex and trans individuals fleeing countries where who they are is criminalised. Many have received credible threats against their life from family members, parents, and the wider community. Many have survived violence, honour-based abuse, forced marriage, so-called “corrective” rape, and conversion practices. Many have been rejected by the people who were supposed to love them most.
These are not stories from a report. They are the lives of the people our team walks alongside, month after month.
Almost 70 countries still criminalise same-sex relations. In Pakistan, the UK government itself recognises that consensual same-sex activity between men carries penalties up to life imprisonment. The risk is not abstract, and it is not historical. It is happening now.
Only around 2% of all UK asylum claims include sexual orientation as part of the reasoning. Claiming asylum on those grounds is one of the hardest things a person can be asked to do. It often means handing over the most private parts of your life to complete strangers, through a narrow lens of what being LGBTQI+ is supposed to look like. This is not a system that simply waves people through.
This coverage will have consequences that reach far beyond the individuals named in it. The people who will pay the highest price are the ones already least likely to be believed. People who have survived in silence their entire lives. People who finally reach a place where they can breathe, only to find a system looking at them with even more suspicion than before.
Our Foundation was born out of loss. It was founded in 2014 after the death of our co-founder’s fiancé, Dr Nazim Mahmood, a gay Muslim doctor who took his own life two days after being confronted about his sexuality by his family. Everything we do carries that story inside it. And one of the things it has taught us is that no one should ever have to choose between who they are, and whether they live.
We stand with every LGBTQI+ person seeking safety in the UK because they cannot safely be who they are at home. We stand with our partner organisations who hold up this community day in and day out. And we support proper, proportionate action against any individual or firm who exploits vulnerable people for profit. Those two things are not in tension. They belong side by side.
To the people we support, and to anyone reading this who is afraid they will not be believed: we see you, we know you, and we are not going anywhere.
Naz and Matt Foundation
