Gay rights across the globe: the best and worst countries for equality
Emine Saner – The Guardian
July 31st, 2013
We have a US president who supports gay marriage, and now a pope who,
if not exactly signing up to equality for all, is at least starting to
talk in language less inflammatory than his predecessor. "If someone is
gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?"
he told an assembled group of journalists on the papal plane back from
his tour of Brazil. Then he went on to criticize the gay "lobby" and
said he wasn't going to break with the catechism that said "homosexual
acts are intrinsically disordered". Still, for a brief moment it looked
like a minor breakthrough.
Then you weigh it against a raft of anti-homosexuality legislation
that is coming into force in countries across the world. In Russia, gay
teenagers are being tortured and forcibly outed on the Internet against a
backdrop of laws that look completely out of step with the rest of
Europe. In what is being described as rolling the "status of LGBT
[lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people back to the Stalin era",
President Putin has passed a number of anti-gay laws, including
legislation that punishes people and groups that distribute information
considered "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations". The country
also now has powers to arrest and detain foreign citizens believe to be
gay, or "pro-gay". It has led to the boycott of Russian vodka brands by
gay bars and clubs in solidarity, started by writer and activist Dan
Savage and taken up by bars in London.
In many African countries where homosexuality is already illegal,
more Draconian anti-gay laws are being passed and violence against LGBT
people is increasing.
Is there a link between growing rights in some countries and
worsening or removal of rights in others? "There are really complicated
links between the two. If you look at the history of the advancement of
LGBT rights in the UK, every advance is accompanied by a backlash," says
Alistair Stewart, assistant director of the Kaleidoscope Trust, a
UK-based organization that supports international LGBT rights. "To a
certain extent that's happening on a global scale now – the advances
that are being made in some parts of the world encourage a backlash in
other parts of the world. The struggle for even basic human rights for
LGBT people – freedom of association, freedom from violence – becomes
harder to achieve when the opponents can point to something like gay
marriage, which isn't even on the books for most of the countries we're
talking about and make the argument that 'if we give these people even
the most basic of human rights, next they'll be asking to get married in
our churches'." Jonathan Cooper, chief executive of the Human Dignity
Trust, is less sure they are related: "The further persecution is
already happening."
Gay rights around the world: the best and worst countries for equality
Equal marriage laws are being passed in
several countries, but in Russia, life grows harsher each month for LGBT
people. Which places are best and worst for gay rights?
An act of defiance in front of a demonstration
against gay marriage in Marseille, France, in 2012. Photograph: Gerard
Julien/AFP/Getty Images
We have a US president who supports gay
marriage, and now a pope who, if not exactly signing up to
equality
for all, is at least starting to talk in language less inflammatory
than his predecessor. "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord
and has goodwill, who am I to judge?"
he told
an assembled group of journalists on the papal plane back from his tour
of Brazil. Then he went on to criticise the gay "lobby" and said he
wasn't going to break with the catechism that said "homosexual acts are
intrinsically disordered". Still, for a brief moment it looked like a
minor breakthrough.
Then you weigh it against a raft of anti-homosexuality legislation
that is coming into force in countries across the world. In Russia, gay
teenagers are being tortured and forcibly outed on the Internet against a
backdrop of laws that look completely out of step with the rest of
Europe. In what is being described as rolling the "status of LGBT
[lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people back to the Stalin era",
President Putin has passed a number of anti-gay laws, including
legislation that punishes people and groups that distribute information
considered "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations". The country
also now has powers to arrest and detain foreign citizens believe to be
gay, or "pro-gay". It has led to the
boycott of Russian vodka brands by gay bars and clubs in solidarity, started by writer and activist
Dan Savage and taken up by bars in London.
In many African countries where homosexuality is already illegal,
more Draconian anti-gay laws are being passed and violence against LGBT
people is increasing.
Is there a link between growing rights in some countries and
worsening or removal of rights in others? "There are really complicated
links between the two. If you look at the history of the advancement of
LGBT rights in the UK, every advance is accompanied by a backlash," says
Alistair Stewart, assistant director of the
Kaleidoscope Trust,
a UK-based organisation that supports international LGBT rights. "To a
certain extent that's happening on a global scale now – the advances
that are being made in some parts of the world encourage a backlash in
other parts of the world. The struggle for even basic human rights for
LGBT people – freedom of association, freedom from violence – becomes
harder to achieve when the opponents can point to something like
gay marriage,
which isn't even on the books for most of the countries we're talking
about and make the argument that 'if we give these people even the most
basic of human rights, next they'll be asking to get married in our
churches'."
Jonathan Cooper, chief executive of the Human Dignity Trust, is less sure they are related: "The further persecution is already happening."
The Human Dignity Trust challenges laws to end the persecution of
LGBT people around the world. "Most countries sign up to international
human rights treaties. If you take Belize as an example, it has ratified
all the key UN human rights treaties and in their constitution they
have a right to a private life, to equality, to dignity. And so
basically to criminalise homosexuality is a violation. To bring a legal
challenge against that takes a very brave individual." It has been
supporting
Caleb Orozco, the gay rights campaigner who launched a legal challenge
to overturn Belize's criminalisation laws. "We're still waiting for the
judgment. They said it would be out by the end of July but obviously
it's not coming now."
Orozco's case has prompted a backlash in Belize against him, and Unibam (the United Belize Advocacy Movement). A
report last week from the Southern Poverty Law Center,
the US civil rights organisation, highlighted the influence US hardline
religious groups had in Belize and other countries. "Many of these
American religious-right groups know they have lost the battle against
LGBT rights in the US, and they're now aiding and abetting anti-LGBT
forces in countries where anti-gay violence is prevalent," said Heidi
Beirich, author of the report. "These groups are pouring fuel on an
exceedingly volatile fire."
It's the classic missionary model, says Stewart, "where money and
resources and organisation are set up in the countries that they are
targeting". It's also worth remembering which country is responsible for
the legacy of persecution faced by millions of LGBT people today. There
are more than 75 countries where homosexuality is still criminalised:
"Forty-two of them are former British colonies so we can see where the
legacy comes from," says Cooper. To see which countries are getting
worse in terms of
gay rights
makes grim reading, but Stewart is cheered by the support he sees. "One
of the reassuring things that has come out of the response to the
Russian laws in particular is there is a growing international
apprehension. One of the last great undone pieces of the civil rights
movement is to address the rights of LGBT people, and there does seem to
be a growing international support for change."
Where are LGBT rights improving?
Parts of Latin America remain the standard for equality for LGBT rights.
Argentina's
Gender Identity Law 2012 allowed the change of gender on birth
certificates for transgender people. It also legalised same-sex marriage
in 2010, giving same-sex couples the same rights as opposite-sex
couples, including the right to adopt children.
Uruguay and
Mexico City also allow equal marriage and adoption, and
last week Colombia recognised its first legal same-sex civil union (not "marriage").
In Asia, LGBT groups are making progess, if slowly. Last year,
Vietnam saw its first gay pride rally and this year's event will launch a campaign for equality in employment.
On Tuesday,
it was reported that the country's ministry of justice has backed plans
to legalise gay marriage, after the ministry of health came out for
marriage equality in April.
In
Singapore the Pink Dot pride rally attracted
21,000 people at the end of June – its biggest number since it started
four years ago. "It's a strong signal that Singapore is not as
conservative as some think,"
Paerin Choa, a rally spokesman, told Reuters. Just hours before attending the rally,
Vincent Wijeysingha became Singapore's first openly gay politician when
he officially came out. The country bans gay sex, though this is rarely
enforced, but in April a gay couple, Gary Lim and Kenneth Chee,
attempted to get the law removed. Their case was dismissed, but they are
appealing with the help of
Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general.
The Human Dignity Trust filed a suit at the European court of human rights against Turkish-occupied
northern Cyprus, the only place in Europe where homosexuality is still illegal, and looks likely to win.
In a letter sent to the Kaleidoscope Trust, the prime minister of
Trinidad and Tobago expressed her wish to repeal the laws that ban homosexuality. The prime minister of
Jamaica,
Portia Simpson Miller,
has voiced similar wishes. In June, Javed Jaghai was the lastest
activist to launch legal proceedings to challenge the anti-sodomy laws
(however, violence against gay people is increasing, and 17-year-old
Dwayne Jones was stabbed to death last week at a party according to local media reports).
In
Malawi, the president Joyce Banda announced in
2012 that laws criminalising homosexuality would be repealed – she has
since distanced herself from that, although there has been a moratorium
and there have been no prosecutions. "So it's not just the global north
where things are moving forward. In some parts of the world where you'd
least expect them, things are getting better," says Stewart.
The number of countries legalising same-sex marriage continues to grow, with
Denmark,
Brazil,
France and
New Zealand just some that joined more progressive countries that had legalised it earlier. Last month in the
US,
where Barack Obama publicly supports equal marriage and it is legal in
several states, the supreme court struck down the Defense of Marriage
Act (which prevented the federal government from recognising marriages
between gay couples) as unconstitutional. And of course
England and Wales now has the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013.
Where are LGBT rights worsening?
In
Iran, a place where homosexuality is punishable
by death and you thought LGBT rights couldn't really get worse, this
year the country's official who works on human rights described
homosexuality as "an illness that should be cured". Of course, gay
rights are no better in many other Middle Eastern countries. The ILGA
(International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association)
provides a comprehensive look at
state-sponsored homophobia in a 2013 report.
Gay-rights
activist Yury Gavrikov is detained by riot police at a rally in Moscow
in May. Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images
Two weeks ago,
Eric Ohena Lembembe, was found at home in Yaoundé, the capital of
Cameroon.
He had been tortured – his neck and feet broken, his body burned with
an iron – and murdered. As the executive director of Camfaids, Lembembe
was one of Cameroon's most prominent and outspoken LGBT rights activists
and openly gay – an astonishing act of bravery in a country where
homosexuality is punishable with prison and violence against LGBT people
is common and almost never investigated.
Amnesty International's 2013 report
on global human rights stated even people who supported LGBT rights
were being harrassed, particularly equality lawyers Alice Nkom and
Michel Togue who had both received calls and text messages threatening
to kill them and their children if they did not stop defending gay
people who had been arrested. In June this year, Togue's office was
broken into and files and computers stolen. In March 2012, a workshop
held to educate young people about LGBT issues was shut down.
Last week, two men were given prison sentences under the country's anti-gay laws; in 2011, another man,
Jean-Claude Roger Mbédé, was sentenced to three years in prison
for sending a text message to another man. Men who are perceived to be
gay are arrested, somtimes only on the basis of someone's suspicions,
and some are forced to undergo rectal examinations and tortured into
confessing. "They have such an active prosecution system," says Cooper.
"Although prosecutions do occur in other jurisdictions, you don't have
that kind of active prosecution policy that you have in Cameroon."
After the death of Lembembe, gay-rights groups
said they couldn't continue their work
unless they are given protection by international donors who fund the
fight against HIV/Aids. "We have all decided to stop our work in the
field because our security is at risk," said Yves Yomb, executive
director of Alternatives-Cameroun. "We have no protection from the
police and we feel that our lives are at risk."
Sharing a border with Cameroon,
Nigeria's anti-gay
laws are becoming ever more draconian. It recently passed a bill
outlawing same-sex marriage, punishable with a 14-year prison term.
"Nobody in the country is seriously asking for gay marriage," says
Stewart from the Kaleidoscope Trust. "There is no reason to legislate
against it, when homosexual sex is already illegal. It also has more
concerning provisions that ban the formation of groups that support LGBT
rights and a series of provisions that if you know a homosexual but
don't turn them in, you are aiding and abetting. That isn't on the
statute books yet but it seems likely that it will pass in some form."
Politicians in
Uganda are attempting to pass a
similar bill, at one point seeking to punish homosexual relationships
with the death penalty; people found guilty of being gay will now face
life imprisonment, and anybody – parents, teachers, doctors – who
suspects someone in their care is gay will be punished if they do not
report them.
Last week, President Mugabe told a rally of Zanu PF supporters that Zimbabwe
would never accept homosexuality, and that gay people were "worse than
pigs, goats and birds". There are 38 African countries where
homosexuality is illegal.
In
Russia, gay rights are moving further away from
other European countries. In an extreme version of Britain's section 28,
a new law will punish anybody disseminating "propaganda of
non-traditional sexual relations among minors expressed in distribution
of information … aimed at the formation … of … misperceptions of the
social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations".
It has also failed to comply with the 2010 judgment at the European
court of human rights that requires it to allow gay pride events.
Violence against LGBT people is rising. In May, there was a brutal
murder of a man who had revealed to "friends" he was gay. Official
numbers of homophobic attacks are low, but LGBT activists say this is
because attacks are not often reported, and when they are police rarely
label them as such, but
one poll last year
of nearly 900 people by the Russian LGBT Network found more than 15%
had experienced physical violence between November 2011 and August 2012.
Last week, the Pink News
reported
neo-Nazi groups in Russia has been luring gay teenagers to meetings,
where they are forced to come out in videos that are then posted on
social media sites. It reported that one victim, 19-year-old Alex
Bulygin, killed himself after his
sexuality was revealed.
Russia's renewed attacks on homosexuality may be spreading beyond its
borders – there are moves in Ukraine to adopt its own ban on "gay
propaganda" and
in May the
parliament dropped a bill that would have outlawed discrimination on
the basis of sexual orientation after a protest by anti-gay activists.
As a result of the culture of lawlessness now increasingly gripping Russia, concerns have skyrocketed about the safety of Olympic athletes and guests during next year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Just yesterday, a Russian lawmaker said that Olympic athletes and visitors would
be subject to arrest under the Draconian new law. And we now know
they’ll also be subject to Russia’s new anti-gay vigilante “police” as
well.
Back to RIA Novosti and the two articles I mention above. I realize
that my praise might get some RIA Novosti reporter sent to a gulag, but
I’m seriously impressed at how fair, and professional, their journalists
are being with this topic.
olitary Confinement Is A Form Of Torture, All Torturers Agree
