“Until Everyone Is Safe” Has to Include Young LGBTQI Refugees & Migrants Too
This statement was drafted by the Board of IGLYO.
This World Refugee Day (20 June), the UNCHR, the UN Refugee Agency asks the world to stand with refugees “until everyone is safe”. We hold them to that word, and we hold ourselves to it. For LGBTQI young people forced to flee, safety is the difference between protection and a forced return to a country where their existence is criminalised.
Young people are uniquely exposed to these harms: many flee family rejection, forced conversion practices, homelessness, school-based violence, criminalisation, and state persecution before they have financial independence, stable housing, or community support. Same-sex relationships remain criminalised in around 65 countries, with the death penalty imposed or possible in 12, amid what ILGA World calls relentless opposition to queer life. People do not flee these laws for adventure. They flee to survive.
Yet for queer refugees, persecution does not end at the border. Increasingly, it is reproduced inside Europe and its asylum systems themselves.
The procedure itself is violent
The harm does not start at deportation. For queer refugees in particular, the asylum procedure is itself a site of violence. Researchers describe this as bureaucratic violence: harm embedded into systems that claim to offer protection while functioning through suspicion, control, and exclusion. The interview room is where this violence becomes personal, particularly for young LGBTQI asylum seekers who are often navigating trauma, unstable housing, language barriers, and adulthood for the first time while being asked to narrate deeply intimate experiences to strangers in positions of authority.
The pattern is extensively documented. Applicants are expected to prove an inner identity on demand and are judged against crude stereotypes, often based on Eurocentric constructs of LGBTQI identities, of how a “real” queer person should behave. The European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) 2025 case law review notes that the Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly had to restate that asylum decisions cannot rely on stereotypes, that intrusive questioning about sexual practices breaches human dignity, and that psychological testing of sexual orientation is unlawful. The fact that courts must continually repeat these rulings shows how routinely these standards are violated in practice.
Credibility assessment remains at the core of the violence for LGBTQI applicants. During these interviews intrusive questions are asked and applicants face the biases of the interviewers. Applicants have been disbelieved because they were previously married, because they appeared “too masculine” or “too feminine,” because they delayed disclosing their identity out of fear, or because decision-makers expected them to narrate trauma in ways legible to Western institutions. Bi+ erasure can also intensify the harm done to bi+ asylum seekers, because in their assessments decision makers often deny, misclassify or invisibilise bi+ experiences, resulting in a higher rejection quota of their applications for asylum.
LGBTQI children and young people are particularly affected by the decision makers’ views around sexuality and gender, as stated by the UNHCR and the EUAA. In this context, decision makers often do not consider children as LGBTQI, due to their own bias around the possibility that one could be both queer and a child. Age, trauma, family dependence, stigma, language, cultural context, and lack of access to safe community spaces can all affect whether, when, and how a young person understands, discloses, or articulates their sexuality, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics. Children and young people may therefore struggle to present their experiences in the linear, confident, or identity-based terms often expected by asylum authorities, especially where they have previously had to conceal their identity for safety. Decision-makers should account for these factors rather than treating hesitation, late disclosure, limited vocabulary, or uncertainty as evidence that a claim is not credible.
Research on queer asylum systems consistently shows that credibility assessments are shaped by racialised and colonial assumptions about sexuality, gender expression, and visibility. Applicants can be expected to narrate a recognisable “coming out” story, adopt legible LGBTQI labels, or demonstrate public queer visibility in ways that reflect Western models of identity rather than their own social, cultural, linguistic, and safety contexts. People who cannot or do not perform these scripts, including those who disclose late, have limited community ties, have been married, are bisexual, are trans or are not visibly queer in expected ways, may be treated with suspicion. These dynamics operate within European asylum systems whose caseloads are largely made up of applicants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including Southwest Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean; however, official statistics record citizenship and region rather than “racialised” status.
In general, LGBTQI asylum applicants require more protection in reception centres because of the accrued risk of discrimination, harassment and isolation. In many European Member states, staff and authorities in reception centres still use official documents of the applicants which can lead to trans refugees being housed not according to their gender identity and exposing them to further discrimination and violence.
At the same time, this violence also reaches white refugees fleeing authoritarian repression. As reported by Novaya Gazeta Europe, queer Russians escaping a state that has labelled the “international LGBT movement” extremist are increasingly encountering disbelief and hostility within European asylum systems.
The evidence is clear: queer asylum seekers are not failed by isolated mistakes but by structures designed around disbelief.
Deportation law is queerphobic and racist by design
Now the European Union is legislating one of its most punitive migration regimes yet. Earlier this week, the European Parliament adopted its position on the proposed EU Return Regulation, what campaigners more honestly call the Deportation Regulation. It still needs formal approval by the European Council before entering into law in September, at the earliest.
In a previous statement, we raised our concerns against this Regulation that dramatically expands immigration detention, undermines access to justice, and opens the door to offshore “return hubs” in countries people may never even have entered. More than 200 civil society organisations have demanded that the proposal be rejected.
The proposed Regulation also extends detention periods from 18 to 24 months, permits the detention of children and families, weakens safeguards against arbitrary detention, and strips appeals of automatic suspensive effect, meaning people could be deported before courts have fully heard their cases. Lacking documents, experiencing homelessness, or simply being considered insufficiently cooperative could become grounds for detention.
For LGBTQI refugees, especially young people, the consequences are particularly severe.
So-called “safe country of origin” frameworks routinely ignore the reality that a country considered safe for the general population may still be profoundly unsafe for a trans person, a queer teenager, or someone targeted because of their gender expression. Evidence from refugee law scholarship demonstrates that many asylum systems continue to treat queer persecution as exceptional or secondary, forcing applicants to overcome extraordinary evidentiary burdens before they are believed.
The proposed Regulation also deepens a broader European trend toward externalisation: moving borders outward, outsourcing detention, and constructing legal distance between states and the violence they enable. Migration justice organisations have repeatedly warned that these policies disproportionately harm racialised communities and reproduce colonial logics of mobility, where the freedom of mobility granted to some lives comes at the cost of, and is constituted on the basis of the unfreedom of, others who are permanently governed through surveillance and containment.
We need to name what this is. Deportation law is not a neutral administrative mechanism. In practice, it is queerphobic and racist in both design and effect.
It detains, surveils, disbelieves, and removes the exact LGBTQI young people our movement claims to defend.
You cannot separate LGBTQI asylum seekers from the broader refugee struggle nor can you separate them from the broader LGBTQI rights movement.
Our mainstream movement has failed these communities
We also need honesty about our own movements.
Too often, established LGBTQI organisations across Europe have concentrated resources around priorities most legible to white, cisgender, securely documented adult constituencies, while young migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers remain at the margins. Queer asylum has too often been treated as a niche issue rather than a frontline struggle. This is also reflected in how the concept of "mobility" is discussed in European institutions that we are part of. The celebration of programmes promoting youth mobility and freedom of movement systematically ignores the realities of people who are denied that same freedom of movement. For those facing border violence, mobility is not an appealing opportunity but a site of exclusion.
This exclusion is reflected in who holds power. Migrants and refugees remain underrepresented inside many LGBTQI organisations, including at board and senior leadership levels where priorities, strategies, and funding decisions are made. A movement that does not include displaced queer people in its leadership will continue designing politics around their absence.
IGLYO does not exempt itself from this critique.
We have too often responded to refugee crises, particularly those affecting trans and gender-diverse refugees, BIPOC+ youth, and asylum seekers, with statements rather than sustained presence. Too often, we have been reactive when we needed to anticipate, symbolic when we needed to organise consistently, and absent from grassroots spaces where displaced communities are already doing the work.
Our partnerships with frontline migrant justice organisations have not always been sustained or adequately resourced. At times, institutional voices, including our own, have been centred over lived experience. We also need to challenge the tendency of only requesting legal recognition through our statements and advocacy as if that could directly guarantee safety. While obtaining legal safeguards is crucial and even life-saving, many LGBTQI asylum seekers continue to face racial profiling and barriers to access essential services even when the legal status is recognised. A movement that proclaims to be committed to safety must look beyond legal recognition and address the material conditions of people’s lives.
Communities are already building the alternative
The alternative already exists, and it is being built by communities.
Campaigns such as We Keep Us Safe remind us that safety does not come from raids, detention centres, deportation flights, or outsourced borders. Safety comes from housing, healthcare, legal support, community infrastructure, education, and material security. It comes from investing in people rather than criminalising displacement.
This is the same safety we demand for every queer young person.
And it cannot stop at any border.
What we are committing to
Our Strategic Plan for 2026–2029 commits IGLYO to supporting LGBTQI youth who are migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers; advocating for asylum procedures that fully respect SOGIESC rights; and building meaningful alliances with anti-racist, feminist, disability justice, and migration justice movements.
Our Manifesto commits us to challenging xenophobia, defending the dignity of migrants and refugees, and rejecting the cynical and instrumental use of LGBTQI rights to justify state violence or anti-migrant politics.
We intend to live those commitments.
That means:
- Building long-term partnerships with frontline refugee and migrant justice organisations rather than appearing only during moments of crisis;
- Resourcing displaced LGBTQI young people, particularly trans youth, BIPOC+ youth, and disabled youth, to lead advocacy, organising, and storytelling themselves;
- Changing who is represented in our leadership spaces and decision-making structures;
- Opposing the EU Deportation Regulation and broader policies of detention and externalisation;
- Advocating for asylum systems grounded in dignity, trauma-informed practice, and self-determination rather than suspicion and surveillance.
And we ask others, including our own Member Organisations, to move with us.
To our peers across the predominantly white, European-led LGBTQI sector: make the same commitments publicly and materially. Put migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers into leadership. Shift resources to frontline organisers. Build structures of accountability rather than symbolic solidarity.
Solidarity that costs nothing is not solidarity.
Until everyone is safe
Until everyone is safe, the work is not done.
That includes us.
The promise of safety belongs to every LGBTQI young person forced to flee, regardless of race, nationality, immigration status, gender identity, sexuality, disability, religion, or class.
This World Refugee Day, we refuse the lie that queer liberation can coexist with detention camps, deportation systems, and borders built on racial exclusion.
The struggle for LGBTQI liberation and the struggle for migrant justice are inseparable.
This time, we intend to keep showing up until that truth is reflected not only in our statements, but in our structures, our organising, and our solidarity.
Supporting Frontline Organisations
We understand that frontline organisations often face significant challenges, particularly those led by individuals with lived experience of migration and refugee processes. These organisations play a vital role in providing support, advocacy, and essential services to some of the most vulnerable members of our communities, often while operating with limited resources and increasing demand.
With that in mind, we especially encourage you to support our Member Organisations working in this field, as well as other organisations operating at the national level within your respective countries. By strengthening and investing in these organisations, we can help ensure that migrants, refugees, and displaced people have access to the assistance, representation, and opportunities they need to thrive.
Please see our Member Organisations working across this area below:
- ACATHI supports LGBTIQ+ migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers through legal, psychosocial, and community-based services, promoting protection, inclusion, and equal rights in Barcelona, Spain.
- Afghanistan LGBTIQ+ Organization (ALO) provides emergency assistance, legal information, case management, asylum and resettlement guidance, advocacy, and referral services for LGBTIQ+ refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced people in the Czech Republic.
- African LGBTIQ+ CY is an organisation in Cyprus dedicated to advocating for the rights and international protection of African queer individuals who have fled their home countries due to persecution and discrimination based on their sexuality.
- Coming Out LGBTQ+ Group is a Russian-speaking LGBTQI+ human rights organisation founded in St. Petersburg and operating in exile from Vilnius, providing legal, psychological, and peer support across the EECA region.
- HOMA documents human rights violations against Iranian LGBTQI+ people and advocates for their protection, including those forced into exile and seeking refuge.
- Inclusive Bangladesh CIC advances LGBTIQ+ rights, safety and dignity through human rights monitoring, emergency support, temporary relocation, refugee and asylum seeker assistance, and community-led advocacy for vulnerable communities worldwide.
- JusticeMakers Bangladesh in France (JMBF) is a Paris-based, non-profit, refugee-led human rights organisation advancing human rights, access to justice, and the protection of refugees, LGBTQI+ people, and other vulnerable communities through advocacy, legal support, and international solidarity.
- NC SOS Crisis Group helps LGBTQ+ people from Russia’s North Caucasus region, where they face persecution, torture, and “honour killings”. The group provides emergency evacuation, shelter, legal, psychological, and humanitarian assistance.
- Queerstion Media empowers Transdiverse individuals of colour, refugees, and asylum seekers through digital activism and creative platforms, centring on fostering storytelling, leadership, and cultural integration, with a focus on inclusivity and wellbeing.
- Rainbow Afghanistan is an Afghan LGBTIQ+-led organization advocating for the rights of Afghan LGBTIQ+ communities in Afghanistan and supporting at-risk Afghan LGBTIQ+ refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Germany, and Europe.
- Spectrum is an anti-racist, intersectional feminist, and trans and gender diverse inclusive organisation that informs and advocates for gender equality with values of Love, Fairness, and Equality.
