Sign the petition: Twenty Kurdish asylum seekers will be deported next week from Sweden to Iran

Twenty Kurdish asylum seekers will be deported next week from Sweden to Iran, where they face detention, torture and possibly execution, unless you stop it.

With their lives on the line, the asylum seekers — all of whom are documented refugees with the United Nations — have taken the extraordinary step of going on a hunger strike to protest their deportation. Several of them have been hospitalized after collapsing from hunger. Those remaining have sewn their mouths shut.

Carin Zellerman is a Change.org member from New York City. She happened to meet the Kurdish asylum-seekers while she was visiting Stockholm last week, and now she’s working to raise a massive international outcry to make the Swedish Ministry for Migration and Asylum Policy reverse its deportation order and save the asylum seekers.

So Carin started a petition on Change.org for the twenty Kurdish asylum seekers. Will you sign her petition to stop Sweden from deporting the activists back to certain persecution in Iran next week?

Iranian penal code calls for the detention and prosecution of any Iranian nationals who seek political asylum overseas. And Iran has executed hundreds of people this year — including Arab Spring activists — at an average of up to two people everyday.

This isn’t the first time that Sweden has deported Iranian activists seeking asylum, despite knowing that doing so threatens their lives. Last year’s deportation of an Iranian activist by Sweden was deemed a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, showing that Sweden is an outlier from the rest of Europe on this issue.

Even though Carin had never before met the Kurds seeking asylum in Sweden, she knew she had to take action to help save their lives. Only global action can save the asylum-seekers from almost certain death. Please sign Carin’s petition to save twenty Kurdish asylum seekers from being deported from Sweden and sent to certain persecution in Iran, and then send it to everyone you know:

http://www.change.org/petitions/sweden-stop-deportation-of-refugees-facing-execution-in-iran

Thanks for being a change-maker,

- Weldon and the Change.org team