The risk of deportation of a "Christian convert" family from Türkiye to Iran

“Mohabbat News” – Mohsen Mokhtari and his wife Azita Ramezani and their two children, 16-year-old Yona and 7-year-old Yoel, are in critical conditions in the refugee camp in the Turkish city of Ağrı and are at risk of deportation to Iran. The Christian family was arrested on October 21, 2024 in the city of Denizli and transferred to the Ağrı camp in the east of the country. 

Sources informed “Mohabbat News” that Mohsen Mokhtari and his wife were active members of a house church in Iran and were repeatedly threatened and interrogated due to their peaceful religious activities. The family left Iran for Turkey in 2014. Since leaving Iran, they have submitted their asylum application to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ankara. Mohsen Mokhtari’s arrest comes despite the fact that he and his family were accepted by the UN in Turkey in 2016 and their case is in the resettlement department.

According to information received by “Mohabet News”, Mr. Mokhtari’s mother, Ms. Pouran Hoshyari, who had traveled to Turkey to visit her son, suffered a “cardiac arrest” after learning of his condition and unfortunately died. It is worth noting that returning Mohsen Mokhtari and his wife Azita Ramezani to Iran could lead to the imprisonment of these Christian citizens.

Since 2015, despite being accepted by the UN, many Iranian refugees have been forced to go through all the steps of receiving their asylum applications again at the Turkish immigration police offices because their applications for resettlement were not accepted by safe countries in Europe or the United States. However, a large number of these refugees were unable to provide convincing reasons to the Turkish immigration police that they were unable to return to their country, which led to the owners of these cases not meeting the conditions for asylum by the Turkish immigration office. Also, in recent years, the number of Iranian refugees receiving deportation orders from Turkish immigration police has increased, and human rights activists have repeatedly warned of the dangers that refugees, especially political and ideological activists, face if they are returned to Iran.