‘It’s not a right’ — Kenya blocking Canadians from resettling LGBTQ+ refugees

NAIROBI — The United Nations says the Kenyan government is blocking Western countries like Canada from resettling LGBTQ+ refugees, leaving hundreds of desperate people languishing in dangerous refugee camps and safe houses in Kenya.

The government’s blocking of exit permits has led some to flee Kenya for even more precarious conditions in South Sudan, in the hopes of reaching the West.

The Canadian Press travelled to Kenya as part of an investigative series looking into a global backslide in LGBTQ+ rights and the consequences for Canada, including the mounting difficulties Canadians face in resettling refugees.

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees told The Canadian Press in a statement that the Kenyan government has stopped processing most refugee claims based on sexual orientation or gender identity, despite both being recognized grounds for such claims.

Kenya used to process those refugee claims at the same rate as other grounds for asylum, the agency said.

“Since 2021 UNHCR has observed that such claims have been increasingly kept on hold without a decision being made,” wrote a spokesman for the Geneva-based agency.

That is even the case for refugees who have completed Canadian immigration security and health checks and been issued formal Canadian travel documents, some multiple times.

The situation got worse last year, with Kenya nearly halting the registration of LGBTQ+ claimants, which they require to legally work, access benefits and health care, or to open a bank account.

“Since late 2023, UNHCR has been informed that persons presenting such claims have at times been refused or been subjected to delayed registration, though the government has made no official communication that registration has been suspended for this group,” the UNHCR said.

Rainbow Railroad, an international resettlement organization based in Toronto, is following the situation closely and programs head Devon Matthews said Kenya has become a “choke point” for LGBTQ+ refugee claims.

“(Those) who are most at risk are fleeing into Kenya — and are finding themselves entirely stuck within the refugee-processing structure in Kenya,” she said.

Kenya houses two of the world’s largest refugee camps, as a generally stable country that borders multiple states with active wars and ethnic conflicts.

Since 2006, Kenya has administered refugee decisions on behalf of the UN, using UN criteria to interview asylum claimants and decide whether they qualify for protection.

Ibrahim Kazibwe, founder of the Community Empowerment and Self-Support Organization in Nairobi, said refugees are increasingly being told that they won’t get an interview for as long as five years if they have claimed asylum on the basis of being a sexual or gender minority.

“The government has put everything on hold for (LGBTQ+) cases,” said Kazibwe.

The UN’s global head of refugee resettlement said his agency has tried negotiating with the Kenyan government to drop its restrictions and abide by international obligations, calling it “a very real issue” for LGBTQ+ people.

“We have to proceed rather discreetly, not to jeopardize — not to put at risk, the people themselves,” UNHCR Commissioner Filippo Grandi told The Canadian Press in a November interview.

He said it’s clear that LGBTQ+ refugees who flee to certain countries are still not safe, even when those states claim to follow UN rules.

“Resettlement is so important, because in many of these situations, that’s the only way — resettlement to countries like Canada that welcome giving refuge to people with these situations,” Grandi said.

Kazibwe fled his native Uganda a decade ago and now runs a safe house for refugees just outside Nairobi. He first lived for four years in the UN’s sprawling Kakuma refugee camp, an arid expanse that houses nearly 300,000 people from across East Africa.

Kazibwe said LGBTQ+ people like himself were regularly subject to discrimination and beatings from other camp residents, as well as from homophobic locals.

Kazibwe’s contacts in the Kakuma camp still report assaults almost every month. The Kenyan government declined a request from The Canadian Press to visit the camp this past July, citing unrelated, wide-scale protests.

The situation for LGBTQ+ people in Kakuma has become so dire that hundreds have fled the camp and made a 400-kilometres journey to the much smaller Gorom camp in South Sudan, a country marred by armed conflict, in the hopes of resettlement to a Western country.

The UNHCR reports more than 450 LGBTQ+ refugees have made the journey from Kakuma to South Sudan since January alone. Of those, 28 have been resettled to the U.S., the agency said.

Those departures fuelled rumours that LGBTQ+ people could avoid years-long waiting in Kakuma and be resettled to Western countries but the camp now houses more than five times the people it was designed for and the humanitarian situation there is considered “extremely dire” by the UNHCR.

It added that South Sudan has followed Kenya in barring registration for asylum claims based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Two LGBTQ+ people in the Gorom camp, who requested their names not be published due to safety concerns, described in video interviews a shortage of toilets and food, and hostility from other refugees.

Kenya’s restrictions have come in spite of pleas from some of the country’s lawmakers to push LGBTQ+ people out of the country.

At an anti-gay rally in Mombasa in September 2023, MP Mohammed Ali decried LGBTQ+ identities as a Western import.

“If you want homosexuals, get them visas and take them to your countries,” he said.

Ali is among MPs supporting proposed legislation to crack down on LGBTQ+ people in Kenya, with the bill seeking to deport any refugees or asylum seekers who commit same-sex acts or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.

In August, the official in charge of Kenya’s processing of asylum applications disputed long-standing UN policy that sexual orientation and gender identity are grounds for refugee status.

“The government of Kenya has never provided for that. It is not going to be provided, neither introduced (or) perpetuated by the refugees,” refugee commissioner John Burugu said at an Aug. 28 forum for refugee organizations, when questioned about the lag in processing LGBTQ+ cases.

He said the criteria for refugee status include persecution and genocide, but not what he referred to as “those letters.” Activists believe he meant the acronym LGBTQ+.

“It’s not a right as far as the Government of Kenya is concerned,” Burugu said. “It is wrong. Please do those skeletons in your cupboard.”

His department and Kenya’s high commission in Ottawa did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Canadian officials, who requested their names not be published due to concerns about damaging diplomatic relations, said they have raised the issue in private with the Kenyan government.

But they acknowledged they don’t necessarily have any power to change it.

They said Canada prioritizes LGBTQ+ refugees because of how dangerous their living conditions are.

Ottawa has tried to resolve the issue by focusing on the overall backlog of asylum claimants in Kenya awaiting interviews — roughly 210,000 people, the UNHCR says. Canada has talked about how more foreign funding could help clear the backlog — especially if Kenya streamlined some of its own requirements.

Matthews, of Rainbow Railroad, said Ottawa and United Nations bodies should be pushing Kenya to take a more hands-off approach to exit permits, such as no longer requiring a refugee-status determination interview for people that Ottawa has already deemed worthy of being resettled to Canada.

In June 2023, Ottawa launched a partnership with Rainbow Railroad to work with the group to resettle some of the world’s most vulnerable LGBTQ+ refugees. Matthews said the project was created in large part to assist people stuck in Kenya due to the Kenyan restrictions, as well as violence in camps like Kakuma.

The Kenyan restrictions have caused havoc for groups that had sought to privately sponsor LGBTQ+ refugees from East Africa, ahead of Ottawa announcing last week it has halted accepting new applications for private sponsorship.

Matthews said Kenya’s restrictions are adding further pressure on an overwhelming number of people being displaced by homophobic legislation and violence.

The group logged 1,400 requests for help from Uganda last year, most coming after the country enacted what’s been dubbed the “Kill the Gays” bill, which criminalizes identifying as LGBTQ+ and allows the death penalty for certain acts.

While Matthews’ group helped pay bail for 144 Ugandans arrested last year, most of the persecution comes from non-government actors.

“It’s the state sanctioned witch-hunt that causes community-level violence and religious violence as well to crop up,” she said.

“Every time someone is arrested or beaten, or publicly shamed or outed, it causes a ripple effect where everyone in that person’s circle or community is also put into an extremely defensive state and in a place of fear.”

The Dignity Network, a coalition of Canadian groups working with LGBTQ+ people abroad, said Ottawa should also do more to fund activists and speak up for human-rights violations before policies get enacted that drive refugee flows.

“We’re frustrated that they haven’t recognized that this is an emergency,” executive director Doug Kerr said of bills in Uganda, Ghana and elsewhere.

“This is the time to really step up and support groups, and Canada does have capacity to do that.”

For now, overwhelming demand has led to Rainbow Railroad shifting some of its focus from trying to resettle people to safer countries in the West, toward funding safe houses and transportation to neighbouring countries.

“A lot of people are in a cyclical run — they’re just running around within Uganda, trying to dodge continued threats. And you can only do that for so long before you decide to flee.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 6, 2024.

This is the fifth story of an eight-part series investigating a backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in Africa and the consequences for Canada as a country with a feminist foreign policy, which prioritizes gender equality and human dignity. The reporting in Ghana, Cameroon and Kenya was written with financial support from the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press