Recently, Persian BBC News has released a report containing data and statistics on Iranian asylum seekers. The detailed report by “Iran Migration Observatory” showed that the statistics and data published in this report from the BBC"s Persian section are inaccurate and untrue.

According to the public relations and information center of the Vice-Presidency for science and technology affairs, Persian BBC News has published a report on December 16^th, 2019 entitled “where did the Iranian asylum seekers flee for four decades?”, written by Ali Ghadimi. Unfortunately, in this report, there were gross statistical errors in the use and analysis of these statistics due to insufficient familiarity with the use of international migration statistics.

In an analytical report, Iran Migration Observatory explained the controversial facts and misunderstandings of the author of this report. The report was published by IOM entitled “the BBC"s gross mistake in citing Iranian asylum seekers”, noting interesting points on errors and contradictory points in the report.

A part of this analysis is presented below:

This is the opening statement of this report: “according to data from UNHCR in year 2018, around 217,000 people of Iranian nationality have sought asylum or similar status in different countries of the world or are seeking asylum and awaiting an answer.”

A few points need to be considered in this regard:

*In this report, it is claimed that 217,000 Iranian people have sought asylum or had submitted a request in this regard in 2018. It seems that the author of this text is not familiar with the concepts of asylum, and has recklessly used the data available on UNHCR database.

Meanwhile, the data available on this database are a collective statistic of several years of asylum and are not related to just the year 2018.

This is the biggest and most bizarre mistake the author has made in this report. In fact, the number of Iranian asylum seekers in 2018 was 129901, which is not just humans and a large part of collective statistics is related to previous years and there has been a slight increase in the rate every year. In addition, some of the asylum seekers have submitted requests in previous years and are still awaiting a response.

This implies to asylum seekers in all countries. Therefore, there is a gross mistake in this BBC report and there has been incomplete understanding of UNHCR data. 

The full text of the analytical report of IMO on gross mistakes of a BBC report on asylum seeking of Iranians in the world is available here.