On March 11, the State Department released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2007. A compilation of the LGBT- and HIV/AIDS-related portions is available at glaa.org. An LGBT-only compilation, available at lgbtfpp.org, was released during a panel discussion in Washington on March 18 by the LGBT Foreign Policy Project, a coalition effort launched late in 2007 to encourage "a clearer and stronger American voice" on international gay rights concerns.
The March 18 discussion featured openly gay former Ambassadors James Hormel and Michael Guest; Scott Long of Human Rights Watch; and Korab Zuka, founder of the first gay rights group in Kosovo, who recently won asylum in the United States. The discussion emphasized the need to press the State Department to act on its findings. An official from State was present and cited a 2007 directive from Secretary Rice for embassies to support human rights more actively, but this was contradicted by Rice's recent waiver of human rights concerns to permit the release of military aid to Egypt.
Long noted a wide variation in the completeness of the individual country reports, reflecting the different priority given to this work from embassy to embassy. For example, the report for South Africa is silent on the rape, torture, and murder of a Johannesburg lesbian couple on July 8. On the other hand, I found 189 countries with relevant entries in the reports for 2007, up from 142 for 2006 and 105 for 2005.
Let's review some highlights, both negative and positive.
In Egypt, the government used emergency courts intended for terrorism and national security cases to prosecute homosexuals and dissidents. The Iranian government closed a reformist daily newspaper for interviewing an alleged gay activist. In Iraq, several gay activists were arrested and tortured, and there were killings by Islamist death squads. In Saudi Arabia, numerous arrests were made at gay parties, weddings, and beauty contests. Dubai police interrogated several people on charges of cross-dressing, which was also criminalized in Kuwait.
Brazil's Bahia Gay Rights Group reported 116 anti-LGBT killings, and "confirmed that police continued to commit abuse and extortion directed against transvestite prostitutes." Neo-Nazi and skinhead gangs in Chile committed anti-gay violence. Five Honduran police officers were charged with torture and illegal detention of several gay activists. Jamaican anti-gay abuses included police harassment, arbitrary detention, mob attacks, stabbings, and targeted shootings.
Gay marchers in Bucharest, Budapest, Moscow and Zagreb were violently attacked. In Kosovo, activists were detained and harassed by police. In Serbia, pro-gay activists were accused of being anti-Serb. Lithuanian gay groups were denied parade permits. Governments in Honduras, El Salvador, and the Philippines delayed, denied, or obstructed registration of LGBT groups.
In India, authors Vikram Seth and Amartya Sen led a campaign to overturn the law criminalizing homosexuality. In Burma, "increasing numbers of children worked in the informal economy or in the street, where they were exposed to drugs, petty crime, risk of arrest, trafficking for sex and labor exploitation, and HIV/AIDS."
In Romania there was widespread discrimination against children with HIV/AIDS. Moscow officials accused foreign non-profits that fight HIV/AIDS of "encouraging pedophilia, prostitution, and drug use among teenagers." A person released from a Havana prison for HIV/AIDS patients reported poor prison conditions, erratic medical care, and irregular provision of antiviral drugs. Across Africa, from Burundi to Zimbabwe, millions of AIDS orphans lived on the streets. The Rwanda report includes this awful line: "Due to the genocide and deaths from HIV/AIDS, there were numerous households headed by children, some of whom resorted to prostitution to survive."
On the plus side, Gay pride events were held successfully in Lima, Taipei, Krakow, Warsaw, Riga (Latvia), Tallinn (Estonia), and Ljubljana (Slovenia). Sierra Leone passed a law prohibiting HIV/AIDS-based discrimination. Mozambique passed a law prohibiting anti-gay workplace discrimination. Dutch parliamentary hearings led to the reversal or delay of government plans to return gay refugees to Iran. The Polish minister of education sought unsuccessfully to bar the promotion of homosexuality in schools, and his party lost its seats in parliament. The Nepalese Supreme Court upheld the rights of sexual minorities. In Thailand, the military stopped labeling homosexuality as a mental disorder. In Taiwan, the Family Violence Prevention and Service Act was extended to same-sex couples.
In some of the harshest places one finds the bravest people. The honor roll of advocacy groups includes Sexual Minorities in Uganda; GenderDoc-M in Moldova; Nash Mir in Ukraine; the Center for Social Emancipation in Kosovo; the Lesbian-Gay Rainbow Association of Comayaguela in Honduras; J-FLAG in Jamaica; and Lambda Istanbul in Turkey.
Even in Mali, where a law against immoral association was used to deny recognition to a gay rights group, it's encouraging that there's a gay rights group in the first place. So now it can be said that there is gay activism from here to Timbuktu.
15 Comments for “State of the World, 2007”
posted by Bobby on
In other words, so much for globalism.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
What’s your point, Bobby? That globalism equals utopia, and the world isn’t a utopia? Whoever said it was or could be? Certainly no IGF author. Gay activism in much of the world is a risky business, borne of an inability or unwillingness of gay people to escape or avoid who they are, and in most places it is not about privileged people indulging armchair Marxism. Your glib, one-line dismissal is awfully disrespectful toward the brave activists I mentioned in my column. It also misses the greater point, which is that the fight for gay equality is on the march across the world. Of course it meets resistance. Nobody said it would be easy. But as a matter of fact, the Internet in recent years has facilitated far more communication among activists in far-flung places than was possible before. Of course, a tool is only valuable to the extent that it is used. I spent the weekend before last scouring a couple of hundred web pages on the State Department website compiling the GLBT- and HIV/AIDS extracts to which I referred in my opening paragraph. I learned a lot. Perhaps some day you will decide to get over yourself and try it sometime.
posted by libertymad on
Many queer theorists and activists would probably call this report ethnocentric and post colonial and would say that people like you are sell-outs. I very much admire your work. Keep it up!
posted by Richard on
More research/discussion on Afrcia and the Middle East would have been nice. Or, even Afghanistan and Iraq…
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Well, there was limited room in my column. My LGBT- and HIV/AIDS-related extracts, which run to 81 printed pages (at 9-point text size), is online at http://www.glaa.org/archive/2008/CountryReports2007.shtml. That document includes a link to the State Department reports. But you will find that the references to these things in the reports tend to be cursory. And in more repressive countries, it is harder and riskier to gather this information. I am hoping that the LGBT Foreign Policy Project will at least be able to nudge the State Dept. to press individual embassies more to gather more complete information on countries’ human rights practices.
posted by Bobby on
“What’s your point, Bobby? That globalism equals utopia, and the world isn’t a utopia?”
—Sure, that’s how the left sells globalism and multiculturalism. In college the newspaper had an “international postcard,” a girl from Zymbabwe wrote very nice things about her country. I was the News Editor and I complained that she did not mention the rampant homophobia in her country, the persecution of white farmers, and any of the other negatives. I wanted something fair and balanced, but because my editor in chief was a multiculturalist, she would not allow me to edit her article and incorporate stuff she didn’t write. This is what multiculturalism is about, lies, just like the rich asshole liberals that go to Costa Rica and then say “oh, look how happy the natives are compared to us?” Maybe if they bothered to dig a little deeper than the hospitality of waiters and cab drivers, they would see that things aren’t always so pretty outside the USA.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Bobby, if you were intending to comment on multiculturalism (which was not mentioned in my article), then that is what you should have said. I and others on IGF have been quite critical of the leftist idea of multiculturalism in which the only culture considered illegitimate is our own. I don’t see “globalism” as carrying all the leftist baggage that you ascribe to it. In any case, the point of the State Dept. Country Reports, and my purpose in culling the gay and AIDS-related items from them, is not to make ourselves feel superior and sneer at the rest of the world. Can’t we please stop making this about ourselves? That’s just what the anti-American gay leftists like to do–treat the State Department reports as being all about the U.S. and specifically George W. Bush. In fact, it is compiled from the work of hundreds of foreign service officers, many of whom take considerable risks to gather the information. If you are truly interested in the state of gay rights around the world, you should be able to examine the work of those foreign service officers without making it an opportunity for self-centered posturing.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Thank you, Libertymad. Queer theorists say all sorts of things based on ideology rather than observation. Many leftists have slammed me for having contributed articles to FrontPageMag.com, which is conservative but not anti-gay; they treat the fact of my having been published by David Horowitz as dispositive evidence of my wickedness all by itself, without bothering to refute (or probably even read) the lengthy and footnoted articles that I wrote for FPM. To which I reply, insults are not arguments.
posted by Brian Miller on
I’m waiting for Scott Long to stumble by and accuse you of being a neoconservative patsy for the Bush administration, advocating war against Islam to preserve gay rights.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Well, elsewhere on IGF you can find an essay of mine from last year in which I took on Scott Long. But after the March 11 panel discussion of the LGBT Foreign Policy Project at the National Press Club, I went up and spoke with Scott and he was quite amicable. He tends to adopt a hostile gatekeer stance toward independent activists or those who don’t do things his way (such as Michael Petrelis in SF or Simon Forbes and Peter Tatchell in London), but he doesn’t control them. The trouble is, he has more resources than they do. That highlights the need for non-left-leaning funding sources.
posted by Jorge on
I wanted something fair and balanced, but because my editor in chief was a multiculturalist, she would not allow me to edit her article and incorporate stuff she didn’t write.
I’m not sure I understand what a News Editor is doing editing what is essentially a Features, maybe even Opinion piece. That kind of stuff should not be edited for content, much less be edited to include things the author didn’t write. I had stuff I didn’t write added to an opinion piece once, and I went public with it and put a stop to it immediately.
Anyway, I didn’t know there even were gay weddings and parties in Saudi Arabia. It is hard for me to imagine what makes people make the decision to take such terrible risks. People in other countries obviously got the idea to organize gay rights groups from somewhere. I don’t know that they’re asking for other people’s help, but it should be available. The US and other countries that care about human rights do have an obligation to report abuses.
posted by Michigan-Matt on
Richard, thanks for an insightful and well-written piece. (I hope you were sitting down for that compliment)
America needs to amend the grounds for granting refugee or asylum status to include sexual orientation. The current cap on granting asylum for all categories at 10k should be raised to 40-50k asylees. Those two policy changes at a minimum.
I can recall when then-Ct of Appeals Judge Sam Alito ruled that persecution based on gender could be grounds for granting asylum (which sent the US State Dept under Clinton into apoplexy), we were moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, not much progress has been made since that 1993-era (?) Alito decision.
Even with a strong Dem majority in the House, bills aren’t even brought to committee vote on expanding the grounds for gays fleeing persecution.
We need and must do more. It wouldn’t hurt if America became known as the most compassionate nation in the free world when it comes to gay persecution.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Michigan-Matt wrote: “America needs to amend the grounds for granting refugee or asylum status to include sexual orientation.”
Actually, that was done in 1994, when Attorney General Reno issued an order stating that “an individual who has been identified as homosexual and persecuted by his or her government for that reason alone may be eligible for relief under the refugee laws on the basis of persecution because of membership in a social group.”
Here is a link to an article discussing it:
http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/v6i3/immigration.htm
Of course, the fact that this option exists does not make it easy for asylum seekers. For one thing, people cannot file for asylum from overseas; they must get here first.
posted by Michigan-Matt on
Thanks for pointing that out, Richard. When I wrote “America needs to amend the grounds for granting refugee or asylum status to include sexual orientation” I should have written Congress needs to instead of America.
Rather than an AG’s opinion or finding, it should be codified in law. And you’re right that just because the option is there doesn’t make it easy… in fact, they still come under the association test -which is problemmatic. And the history of asylees granted sanctuary because they were gay and persecuted isn’t compelling given the extent of the problem worldwide.
Further, as a good friend and former staffer for the House Immigration SubCo tells me, the truth is he can literally name outloud the gays who have made it through the tough battle to secure sanctuary in America. And that short litany doesn’t need to include folks who have battled/are battling via intense and expensive litigation in fed cts to stay.
It’s still a tough row to hoe… even with Judge Alito’s seminal decision or Janet Reno’s subsequent AG opinion.
And all of that doesn’t even touch on the issue of allowing a partner safe haven… but we may never get that as long as DOMA is in place.
posted by Last Of The Moderate Gays on
Richard, thanks for reminding us that while we have a long way to go here, when compared with most of the world, we have it pretty good.
On a lighter note, in the latest issue of a gay magazine I picked up, there was an ad for a gay cruise of the Nile and another cruise of the Yangtze River. Perhaps these people need to contact you before they sell any rooms! I was thinking that perhaps these nitwits would next be selling tours to other gay-friendly hotspots such as Pyongyang, Damascus and Teheran . . .