The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that LGBT migrants may be at specific risk of violence and abuse even after being forced to flee their home countries.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi spoke out on the issue on the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia earlier this week and claimed that LGBT migrants still face challenges after fleeing their homelands.
“Yet, even as they try to find safety, they often continue to face risks, including violence or sexual abuse. Discrimination is often the one thing LGBTIQ+ refugees cannot leave behind — in many cases it follows them across borders as they continue to face barriers to finding a safe place to live, a job, or even seeing a doctor,” Grandi said, the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants reports.
Over the last several years since the height of the migrant crisis in Europe in 2015 and 2016, some countries have created entirely separate accommodations for LGBT migrants, primarily due to threats of violence from other migrants.
In 2016 in Berlin, the city set up separate asylum accommodations for LGBT asylum seekers, with the Lesbian and Gay Berlin-Brandenburg (LSVD) association stating that year that they had received 95 accusations of violence toward them from August to December of the prior year.
In the Netherlands in 2015, gay migrants were also moved away to separate accommodations due to threats and attacks against them, despite former Dutch minister Klaas Dijkhoff arguing that separate accommodation for homosexuals may be “stigmatising.”
Several years later in 2020, a Nigerian woman was seriously injured by a fellow migrant in a Dutch asylum home in what was alleged to be a homophobic attack.
LGBT Asylum support foundation chairman Sandro Kortekaas described the incident saying, “The attacker, also from Nigeria, actually tried to throw the water over another lesbian woman and her 18-month-old son.”
“Her friend jumped in to protect them and now has large second-degree burns right from her armpit to her buttock,” Kortekaas said.