The Government swiftly drew back yesterday from a monstrous injustice. Within hours of receiving a letter from more than 60 members of the House of Lords, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, announced that the Government would reconsider its refusal to grant asylum to a 19-year-old Iranian homosexual, who fears he will be hanged if he is sent back to Iran. Mehdi Kazemi came to Britain in 2005 as a student, and while here he learnt that his lover in Iran had been convicted of sodomy and hanged. He applied for asylum but was refused, on the ground that, while it was conceded that Iran executes homosexuals, there was no “systematic” repression of gay men and lesbians. Shortly before his deportation, he fled to the Netherlands, but is due to be sent back here soon under the EU rules that give responsibility for asylum decisions to the country where refuge was first sought.

The case has generated a huge and justified outcry. Homosexuality is illegal in most Muslim countries and in much of Africa. But Iran's draconian punishments are peculiarly barbaric. Gay males as young as 15 are hanged in public from cranes using the method of slow strangulation, designed to cause maximum suffering. Iranian human rights campaigners say that more than 4,000 gay men and lesbians have been executed since the 1979 revolution, and thousands more have been sentenced to 100 lashes for consensual sexual relations in private. The Iranian criminal code devotes some 32 articles, numbers 108 to 140, to homosexual offences and their punishment, and senior clergy insist that, according to their interpretation of Islamic law, capital punishment for lavat, or sodomy, is mandatory.

As with other repressive regimes, Iran's criminalisation of homosexuality is often a convenient way of punishing political opponents. The Soviet Union frequently used such charges against dissidents against whom there was little other specific evidence. Zimbabwe has capitalised on widespread prejudice against gay people to smear or arrest President Mugabe's opponents. Gays were also ferociously persecuted by Fidel Castro's Government in Cuba. What is especially hypocritical, however, is the assertion by such governments that this “Western” vice does not exist in their societies. President Ahmadinejad said in New York last year that “we don't have homosexuals like in your country”, even as an Iranian MP, Mohsen Yahyavi, said to a British counterpart that Iran executed homosexuals who, he thought, deserved also to be tortured.

Britain is not the only country to be wary of granting gay people asylum. Sweden, Japan and the Netherlands have also rejected appeals by Iranians. The fear is that this criterion could open the doors to huge numbers of people, from across the Middle East and Africa, who could claim a justified “fear of persecution”. Social discrimination affects many groups in many countries, and Europe does not have a duty to offer them all shelter. But Mr Kazemi is a special case: there could be few clearer warnings that his life would be in danger, especially after he spoke out. A well-organised campaign by human rights activists has ensured that the Home Office reaches the obvious conclusion. The Government is not only right to provide refuge to Mr Kazemi, but is to be applauded for sending an unequivocal message to Tehran.