Public research and advocacy can create identifiable, nationwide risks that relocation cannot reliably erase. A legal and investigative analysis of persecution agents, return risk, and non-refoulement obligations.
|
Milad Torabi
For an LGBTQ+ researcher, writer or advocate returning to the Islamic Republic, the central question is not whether every critic is arrested. It is whether the person's specific profile creates a real and personal risk of serious harm. Public work on criminalization, security institutions and LGBTQ+ rights can increase that risk because it makes the individual identifiable and gives authorities a record that can be interpreted through both moral and national-security frameworks.
The danger is cumulative. Visibility created by publication can be combined with the substance of the work, the identities of institutions criticized and the national reach of security bodies. If the person has named or analyzed police, IRGC, Basij or judicial structures, the issue is no longer only private sexual identity. It can become a question of perceived opposition, propaganda or foreign-linked activity.
That distinction matters in migration law. A return assessment should examine the foreseeable consequences for the individual, not rely on the possibility that they could hide their identity, abandon their work or relocate internally. Where risk is nationwide and tied to state institutions, concealment is not a durable protection strategy.
The security structure relevant to return risk is not confined to one police unit. The material identifies the IRGC Intelligence Organization, the Sarallah security command in Tehran and the Basij as institutions with capacity to monitor researchers, activists and networks. It names senior figures associated with those bodies, including Mohammad Kazemi in IRGC intelligence, Hossein Nejat in the Sarallah command structure and Gholamreza Soleimani in the Basij.
These references are significant because they demonstrate institutional reach. A person whose work concerns LGBTQ+ rights may be visible not only to ordinary police but to bodies tasked with ideological and security monitoring. Research can be characterized as cultural activity, foreign influence or opposition depending on the authorities' interpretation.
The publication of material outside the country can also create a durable digital footprint. Articles, interviews and social-media posts are searchable. Border screening and later questioning do not require the authorities to discover a hidden private life from scratch if the person's name is already attached to public work.
Once identified, the individual may face interrogation about contacts, organizations, funding, sources and collaborators. The investigative value of one person can therefore extend beyond that person's own conduct. This network logic increases the incentive for security institutions to question researchers and advocates.
Return risk can arise through more than one legal route. Provisions concerning same-sex conduct create one category of exposure. Separate provisions concerning propaganda, corruption, morality or national security can create another. A public critic may therefore face allegations linked both to LGBTQ+ subject matter and to the act of publishing or organizing around it.
The available analysis highlights several plausible forms of accusation: propaganda against the system, promotion of corruption or prostitution, and national-security offenses where authorities attribute advocacy to hostile or foreign networks. The precise charge in any individual case would depend on the facts and prosecutorial choices, but the elasticity of these categories is itself relevant to risk.
This legal overlap gives interrogators leverage. Even if evidence for one allegation is weak, the threat of another can be used to demand cooperation. A person may be pressed to identify contacts, provide passwords or explain relationships. Pretrial detention and interrogation can become the principal harm regardless of the eventual verdict.
The severity assessment must therefore include treatment during arrest and questioning, not only the statutory maximum sentence. Where detention carries a credible risk of coercion, abuse or prolonged uncertainty, the return analysis cannot be reduced to whether a final conviction is guaranteed.
Three questions are especially important in assessing a real risk. First is visibility: can authorities identify the person and connect them to the relevant work? For a named author with publicly accessible publications, the answer may be yes. Second is severity: what treatment could follow identification? The combination of criminalization, security interrogation and the possibility of serious punishment raises the stakes beyond ordinary discrimination.
Third is the availability of an internal flight alternative. That option is weak where the feared actors are national institutions. Moving from Tehran to another city does not place a person outside the reach of IRGC intelligence, national police systems or the judiciary. Civil registration and identity systems also make permanent disappearance difficult.
The same logic applies to digital visibility. A researcher cannot realistically erase all copies of published work or guarantee that archived material will not be found. Requiring a person to renounce future expression or conceal a protected identity would shift the burden of persecution onto the potential victim.
Internal relocation may still alter practical circumstances in some cases, but it should not be treated as a generic answer. The relevant question is whether the proposed location actually removes the identified source of risk. When the source is the state itself, geography offers limited protection.
International protection law focuses on foreseeable harm to the individual. Under the Convention against Torture and the broader principle of non-refoulement, a state must not return a person where substantial grounds indicate a real risk of prohibited ill-treatment. The assessment is forward-looking and must consider the person's profile as a whole.
For an LGBTQ+ researcher or advocate, that profile may include sexual or gender identity, publication history, criticism of state institutions, public visibility and the inability to relocate safely. None of these elements should be examined in isolation. Their interaction can create a risk greater than the sum of its parts.
The decisive point is not that every LGBTQ+ person or every researcher will experience the same outcome. Individualized analysis remains essential. But where a person is publicly identifiable, has produced work criticizing criminalization and security institutions, and would return to a system in which those institutions possess nationwide reach, the possibility of serious harm cannot be dismissed as speculative merely because the exact date or form of future enforcement is unknown.
The wider system revealed by such cases is one in which visibility can become evidence. Research, identity and association can be combined into a security narrative, and the person may have no realistic way to make that narrative disappear upon return. That is why a credible risk assessment must examine institutions, legal mechanisms and the individual's public footprint together.
