Gay asylum case communicated by ECHR - A.R.B. v the Netherlands

The Third Section of the European Court of Human Rights has communicated the case of A.R.B. v the Netherlands. 

The case, which has been communicated with extreme brevity, concerns an Afghan national, born in 1999, whose second application for asylum in the Netherlands, "in which he claimed for the first time that he was a homosexual", was rejected because "his alleged sexual orientation was not believed".

The Court has asked the following questions to the parties:

"In the light of the applicant’s claims and the documents which have been submitted, would he face a real risk of being subjected to treatment in breach of Article 3 of the Convention on account of his alleged sexual orientation if he were expelled to Afghanistan?"

I have written here many times (most recently in April) about how the Court responds to complaints of this type, and have called the Court's record in this area "shameful".

This communicated complaint gives the Court another opportunity to develop its jurisprudence to protect gay men and lesbians being forcibly expelled from Council of Europe states to countries that criminalise same-sex sexual acts and, in some cases, punish them with death.