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Wait, what? So, if Saudi Arabia passed a law against Christians and then prosecuted them (after full "due process" of course!), they wouldn't be eligible for asylum in the US?
The definition of asylum can't be limited to just due process. It has to account for the laws that said due process is upholding!
It is possible to seek asylum from SA to the US if you are prosecuted for homosexuality in SA.
Though if someone comes from SA seeking asylum, and are told they won't get it, and then marries a US citizen in the hopes of dodging extradition, I would at the very least question their judgment.
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In the US, asylum requires persecution on one of five grounds:
race
religion
nationality
political opinion
a particular social group
So Christians would be covered. Were Scheerer prosecuted for being German, for voting far-right, or similar, he would be covered. Holocaust revision, however, is not recognized as the political category.
“Particular social group” is notoriously fraught. Intuitively, I would have thought it applied to deniers, but apparently the usual meaning%2C%20and%2C) is more about professions, family ties, or social class. Or as a catchall for Title IX groups which didn’t hit the other categories. Regardless, Scheerer’s lawyers didn’t try that tack.
Feels like splitting hairs. How is supporting a highly unpopular opinions not covered? Because it's outside the Overton window in this case?
How could you cover unpopular opinions? Surely fraudsters, murderers and war criminals are all unpopular. We can’t give asylum to everyone accused of a crime. We do provide it in the case of trumped-up charges or those specific classes, which is why it Scheerer tried to argue both.
I’m more sympathetic to saying we shouldn’t extradite for crimes we don’t recognize. In fact, we usually don’t, because most of the crimes we don’t recognize fall under one of the five classes. Even speech ones, given the political category. So this is kind of a weird edge case.
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