Audio: In New Zealand, gay Pakistani couple's marriage dream shattered by threats

Source: GayNZ.com

A gay Auckland couple has given up on its dream of being married in New York, after threats were apparently made against family members in Pakistan.

Emad Khan and Haseeb Meta were about to be announced as winners of radio station ZM's Same Sex in the City competition when Khan called in to reveal he and his partner could no longer take part.

"Haseeb and I and our loved ones have been put in a very awkward and bizarre situation and I think we're just going to stay put and just get married in New York another time probably."

A shocked breakfast host Polly Gillespie questioned him further and he explained his family was unsafe and did not want to elaborate further for their sake.

"We have felt amazing, like, throughout this journey and it has been really awesome and we've really loved people who have voted for us and everything, it's been really amazing. But we've had a difficult night."

Grant Kereama expressed absolute disbelief, but both hosts expressed understanding at the situation.

The couple has already overcome meeting and falling in love in a country where homosexuality is illegal, living apart as Meta cared for his terminally ill mother and moving to New Zealand together.

The runners-up Hayles Sherry and Tashie Mills from Wainuiomata will now be married in New York instead.

Friends of Khan and Meta are shocked and devastated at the situation after rallying to help them get enough public votes to live their dream. There has also been an outpouring of concern from ZM listeners.

Resource: The Global Detention Project

Norway's Trandum Detention Centre

The Global Detention Project (GDP) is an inter-disciplinary research endeavour that investigates the role detention plays in states’ responses to global migration, with a special focus on the policies and physical infrastructures of detention. The project, which was initiated in October 2006 with funding from the Geneva International Academic Network, is based at the Graduate Institute’s Programme for the Study of Global Migration.

To assess the growth and evolution of detention institutions, project researchers are creating a comprehensive database of detention sites that categorises detention facilities along several dimensions, including security level, bureaucratic chain of command, facility type (is a given site an exposed camp, a dedicated migrant detention facility, or a common prison), spatial segregation (are there separate cells for criminals and administrative detainees, for women and men), and size. This data is gradually being ported to the GDP website in the form of maps, lists, and country profiles. Eventually, the project intends to make the entire database fully interactive with the website.

In December the project released five new reports covering Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Belize and detention at Europe's borders.

Read more »

New Zealand Refugee and Asylum Policy

Source: gaynz.com

By: Craig Young

After the resolution of provocation defence and adoption reform issues, asylum and refugee policy may be the next major area of concern for LGBT New Zealanders. As I’ve noted beforehand, there are a handful of homophobic ‘black spot’ nations whose LGBT inhabitants are at risk from human rights and civil liberties violations.

New Zealand should be doing more about this, through renewed governmental human rights initiatives and membership of multilateral forums like the United Nations, APEC and CHOGM. Furthermore, we should press for an increased overall intake of refugees and asylum seekers from societies like Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Iraq and Iran, given their current crises. Russia and Jamaica are in a different situation, given that Jamaica suffers from widespread poverty. However, economic pressure might be prudent in this situation, especially insofar as the United Nations and CHOGM are concerned. Perhaps UNDP Director Helen Clark could be constructively lobbied to this end.

Expatriate Australian UK LGBT rights activist Peter Tatchell is fiercely critical of the British asylum seeker process, arguing that it imposes impossible burdens on potential claimants who are trying to escape transphobic and homophobic persecution in their countries of origin. He argues that British asylum seeker policy seems deliberately intended toward often erroneous assumptions that all asylum seeker requests for sanctuary are somehow “fraudulent.” Detention, torture and rape are insufficient grounds in themselves, and LGBT asylum seekers may be forced to return to societies like Iran or Jamaica, which have execrable LGBT human rights and civil liberties records, he argues.

Granted, New Zealand doesn’t have as dire a recent history of asylum seeker abuse as Australia did during the Howard era, and its shameful detention seeker camps in the outback, in which asylum seekers did not receive social welfare benefits and suffered prolonged isolation and imprisonment until the Rudd administration closed them down. However, in our own case, the Ahmed Zaoui case suggests that refugee and asylum policy here may not be as resilient as it could be. One should watch forthcoming developments in this policy area with interest and concern.