If we had to pick the world’s most active legal forum for LGBT rights, it would be the European Court of Human Rights. Following is a summary of a decision from last week, plus three other cases in the pipeline. The Court has also published an excellent summary of its decided and pending sexual orientation-related [...]
Spain’s National Court (Audencia Nacional) has denied the asylum claim of a transgender Colombian national. The individual, whose identifying details were not reported in the original story by Spain’s El Diaro De Cádiz, had been living in Spain since 2000 but entered deportation proceedings in March 2011. Despite urging from no less an advocate than [...]
A statement released yesterday from Stop the Deportations: For the first time since the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) November 17 announcement that a national “working group” had begun reviewing all cases currently pending in immigration courts, Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has closed a deportation case involving a married same-sex couple. Although the latest [...]
Announced by the European Parliament's Intergroup on LGBT Rights: Today the European Parliament formally adopted a new set of asylum rules for the European Union. The binding rules now include gender identity as a ground of persecution, which EU Member States must take into account. Governments have already agreed to the changes, which are final. Until [...]
UK authorities have begun inputting information on sexuality-based asylum claims into the Central Information Database of the UK Border Agency (UKBA). From LGBT Asylum News: The UK joins only five other countries which record data on the number of LGBT persons benefiting from asylum/subsidiary protection due to persecution on the ground of sexual orientation: Austria, Belgium, [...]
From the LA Times, reporting on the impact on same-sex couples of new, more compassionate guidelines on deportation issued last month by the Obama administration: …As the nation remains entrenched in a debate over what to do about an estimated 11 million illegal residents, the Obama administration has released new guidelines to provide flexibility in [...]