Gay Filipino Wins Asylum Case in Historic Decision New America Media

n a possible precedent-setting case, a gay Filipino man was granted political asylum on May 21, 2009 based on his claim that he would suffer persecution in his homeland for being a homosexual. Immigration Judge Loreto Geisse granted the asylum application of Philip Belarmino, a 43-year-old gay man from the Philippines, preventing him from being deported from the United States.

Immigration law experts generally believe that applications for asylum based on gender are nearly impossible to win. Belarmino also had to overcome the one year statutory bar for the filing of asylum applications from the time of entry in the United States as he filed his application more than one year after his arrival.

Belarmino was represented by Ted Laguatan, a certified immigration law specialist who has won major cases against the U.S. government and corporations not only in immigration law but also in civil cases involving millions of dollars.

Belarmino was an English professor in the Philippines for 17 years prior to his arrival in 2005 on a visitor’s visa. He testified that when he was 9 years old and again when he was 11 years old, he was forced to engage in anal and oral sex by older boys. And at age 16, threatened with a knife, a houseboy forced him to do oral and anal sex at various times. He testified that he did not report these incidents to his parents as he did not want them to know he was gay – which would have traumatized them. See Gay Filipino Wins Asylum Case in Historic Decision

New America Media

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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/gay-filipino-…

Gay Iraqi could face death penalty if deportation goes ahead

A gay Iraqi man due for deportation tomorrow has been told by the UK Border Agency to conduct his relationships “in private” on his return to Iraq, where homosexuality is punishable by death.

Campaign group Iraqi LGBT says the asylum seeker will become the seventh gay Iraqi to be returned to the country by the UK, despite the country being one of only nine in the world where homosexual people are executed.

Though a ruling was made in September 2007 allowing two gay Iraqis to remain in the UK, campaigners working on behalf of the man facing deportation tomorrow say his case was held too long ago to benefit from the change in case law achieved in 2007.

Keith Best, the director of the Immigration Advisory Service, told the Guardian that the government ought to give the asylum seeker a fresh hearing.

The United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) has said that the man’s homosexuality did not form the basis of his original asylum application in 2001 and that his subsequent conviction for seeking to stay in the country illegally makes him an untrustworthy defendant, undermining his claim to be gay. See Gay Iraqi could face death penalty if deportation goes ahead
American Chronicle, CA