Immigration service officials are not following new guidelines for dealing with gay, lesbian and bisexual asylum seekers, specialist lawyers and the COC campaign group say in Wednesday’s Trouw.

Refugees are still being questioned about their sexual identity using western terminology such as ‘developing awareness’ and ‘self-acceptance’, the organisation and lawyers say.

In July junior justice minister Mark Harbers said that refugees who claim to have left their home country because of their sexuality should face a different line of questioning, with less emphasis on western terminology.

But several cases, the paper said, show nothing has changed in the way officials decide whether a refugee is really gay or not.

‘The IND is acting as if nothing has changed and this is incomprehensible and unacceptable,’ COC spokesman Philip Tijsma told the paper.

The COC says some 500 refugees a year ask for asylum on the basis of their sexual identity. Four in 10 claims are rejected, in 85% of cases because officials do not believe the person is really gay.

Harbors told MPs at the beginning of this month that he would make the new policy clearer to officials in a written briefing.

In June 2017, a gay Iraqi refugee was given temporary leave to stay in the Netherlands after judges in The Hague said officials were wrong to say he was ‘not gay enough’.

The then-junior justice minister Klaas Dijkhof refused to give him a refugee permit, saying he had not sufficiently proved that he was homosexual. Dijkhof based his ruling on the man’s description of how he realised he was gay.