An article published by OpenDemocracy on Friday exposes the disproportionate impact of hostile immigration policies including the Nationality and Borders Act (2022) and Illegal Migration Act (2023) on LGBTQI+ people fleeing persecution, focusing on so-called “safe” states including India and Georgia. Find a summary below, or read the full version.

Growing up, Anna* always knew she was a lesbian. She also knew that her life would be at risk if anybody found out. Anna was eventually able to escape, becoming one of at least 86 LGBTIQ+ people from Georgia who applied for asylum in the UK between 2015 and 2023. Today, other Georgians in her position would not have the same opportunity. Though life in the country remains just as dangerous for LGBTIQ+ people, the British government has declared Georgia “safe” – meaning they can no longer successfully claim asylum here.

This is just one of the many ways that the UK’s hostile immigration policies have endangered LGBTIQ+ people around the world. Laws that have disproportionately impacted LGBTIQ+ people fleeing persecution include the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (NABA) and the Illegal Migration Act 2023 (IMA). Such an outcome was predicted by the government’s own assessment of its 2021 New Plan for Immigration, the policy platform that would go on to inform the two pieces of legislation.

The IMA gave the Home Secretary heightened powers to add countries to an existing list of nations considered ‘safe’ without the need for parliamentary approval. Asylum applications from people of these nationalities are automatically judged inadmissible and will not be considered.

It was this power – Section 59 of the IMA – that the Home Office used in November 2023 to declare Georgia safe. But for Anna and many other Georgians, the country is anything but.

“There are two [things] that would happen if I stayed in Georgia,” Anna told openDemocracy. “My father would kill me because of my orientation, or my ex-husband would kill me because I left him and also because of my sexuality.”

Georgia is not the only country to have had its status changed via the IMA. India, whose LGBTIQ+ community continues to face violence and discrimination despite homosexuality having been decriminalised in 2018, was also declared safe.

Like Anna, Priya* grew up hiding her sexuality from her family in India, whom she said “would hurt or kill” her if they found out. In time, her parents arranged for her to marry a man, but her fiancé called off the engagement when she told him the truth about her sexuality. Though he agreed not to tell her family, it was not long before they discovered her secret.

With few options left, Priya flew out to the UK and claimed asylum. Although she was initially refused, she won an appeal and now has refugee status. But she worries about other lesbian women in her home country, who will find it much harder to get asylum in the UK.

A coalition of LGBTIQ+ and migrant rights activists is now asking the Labour government to repeal the IMA. While the ruling that Georgia and India are safe has not yet come into force, other parts of the UK’s immigration legislation are already being used to limit asylum claims from LGBTIQ+ people from around the world.

The plight of LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers reveals how the caricaturisation of all people arriving into the UK as dangerous, criminally-minded single men, in sections of the press and political discourse, has justified increasingly draconian legislation that threatens the lives and liberties of vulnerable individuals seeking safety, in the hope that the United Kingdom lives up the values that it claims to espouse.

Minesh Parekh, policy and public affairs Manager at Rainbow Migration, a charity that supported Anna and Priya, told openDemocracy that now is the time for Labour to reverse the harms of NABA and the IMA, and “make the UK a place of refuge for LGBTQ+ people”.

“Imagine facing violence just for being LGBTQ+, fleeing your home, hoping for refuge in the UK, only to be told your country is ‘safe’ when you know it isn’t,” he said. “Being sent back isn’t just unfair, it’s cruel.

“Now the government must go further and repeal the Illegal Migration Act (IMA 2023) in full. The IMA is inhumane legislation that punishes people simply for seeking safety.”