A UK judge has tossed the deportation case of an Iranian asylum-seeker, who had raped a teenage girl, over concerns that his conversion from Islam to Christianity — which the judge found to be faked — could expose him to danger in the Islamic Republic.
The court looked through his 850 Twitter posts, which quoted verses from the Bible and religious images, as well as retweets that were likely to invoke the wrath of Iranian authorities.
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The judge accepted that the Iranian falsely claimed that he had converted to Christianity as a pretext to avoid deportation. However, the judge ruled the man still cannot be deported to Iran because he would be "viewed as someone involved in anti-Islamic conduct", even if Tehran also accepts that his alleged faith in Christ was a lie.
"In all the circumstances, I am satisfied that the appellant has established that there is a real risk that on his return he would be questioned about the details of his asylum claim and that that questioning would reveal that he has posted on Twitter," the judge said, adding that his interrogation would involve a real risk of ill-treatment.
The 38-year-old man, identified as 'AM' in the court papers, is said to have left Iran illegally and entered the UK on 15 January 2006. He applied for asylum on the same day, but his bid was rejected. However, his subsequent application for a European Economic Area (EEA) Residence Card, which he filed on the grounds that a member of his wife's family was an EEA resident, was approved in December 2009 for five years, expiring 2014.
The man was handed a five-year prison term for raping a 17-year-old girl in 2012. He was released from prison in August 2015, when then-Home Secretary Theresa May ordered his deportation, as she deemed him to pose "a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to the public".
