Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni - Aftermath

Aftermath

In addition to Human Rights Watch, Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, has also said "It was not a gay case." Ettelbrick has also said she was also disturbed by the charged language used by some gay rights groups to condemn the execution, pointing to Peter Tatchell's statement, "This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran."

Both Sweden and The Netherlands responded to the stories around the Mashhad executions by announcing that they would immediately halt extraditions of LGBT asylum claimants to Iran. The Dutch government also announced that its Ministry of Foreign Affairs would investigate the treatment of gays and lesbians in the country. Civil rights groups in the U.S., United Kingdom and Russia have also called for similar policies.

In March 2006 Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk ("Iron Rita") proposed an end to a moratorium on deporting gay asylum-seekers to Iran, stating that it was now clear "that there is no question of executions or death sentences based solely on the fact that a defendant is gay", adding that homosexuality was never the primary charge against people. Under parliamentary pressure, and based on evidence from groups including Human Rights Watch that torture of gays in Iran remained endemic, she was forced to extend the moratorium on deportation for a further six months. In late 2006, also due to lobbying from groups including Human Rights Watch, the Netherlands instituted a new policy of removing the burden of proof from Iranian LGBT refugee claimants.

Scott Long of Human Rights Watch has written that "lesbian and gay Iranians are not abstractions, sheltered from politics - or missiles. Their lives should not be reduced to the agendas of well-meaning strangers in the West." He added, criticizing allegations he considered unsupported, that "If we want to challenge Iran’s government, we need facts. There is enough proof of torture and repression that we can do without claims of 'pogroms.'"

In 2006, the one-year anniversary of the hangings in Mashhad was designated an International Day of Action Against Homophobic Persecution in Iran by OutRage!, with vigils planned for Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Frankfurt, London, Marseille, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Stockholm, Tehran, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, Warsaw, and Washington, D.C., and with hearings planned in the British House of Commons. These demonstrations saw a renewal of controversy over whether the claims made about the case by OutRage! had any basis in fact. Attempts to hold a new series of demonstrations in July 2007 reached only a far smaller number of cities.

The New York Times reported that ISNA, the student news agency, carried photographs of the execution. The Washington Post reported, as to the photographs of the hanging, that: "Not since they confronted snapshots of a slightly built young man named Matthew Shepard and the fence where he was left for dead in 1998 by two drug-addled no-hopers in Laramie, Wyo., have gay people been so agitated by a set of photographic images. Protesters brought black-and-white reproductions of the pictures – which show the public execution last year of two teenage boys in Iran – to a rally in Dupont Circle ... The images were also used in other protests, at least 26 in countries around the world, according to bloggers involved in organizing them, and the images are displayed in the windows of Lambda Rising bookstore, near Dupont Circle."