[Reader-list] A watershed for gay rights

[Angshukanta Chakraborty]

A watershed for gay rights The UN must pass this week's historic declaration
calling for the decriminalisation of homosexuality worldwide Comments
(52)<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/08/gayrights-unitednations?commentpage=1>

   - [image: Peter Tatchell]
   <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/petertatchell>
   -
      - *Peter Tatchell* <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/petertatchell>
      - guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Monday December 8 2008
      20.00 GMT
      - Article
history<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/08/gayrights-unitednations#history-byline>

 A declaration calling for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality
will be put before the United
Nations<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/unitednations>General
Assembly<http://www.un.org/english/>this Wednesday, which is Human
Rights Day and the 60th anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It will be the first time in its history that the UN General Assembly has
considered the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human
rights.

Although it will not be binding on the member states, the declaration will
have immense symbolic value, given the six decades in which homophobic
persecution has been ignored by the UN.

If you want to understand why this decriminalisation declaration is so
important and necessary, ponder this: even today, not a single international
human rights convention explicitly acknowledges the human rights of LGBT
people. The right to physically love the person of one's choice is nowhere
enshrined in any global humanitarian law. No convention recognises sexual
rights as human rights. None offers explicit protection against
discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Yet 86 countries<http://www.ilga.org/news_results.asp?LanguageID=1&FileCategoryID=9&FileID=1165&ZoneID=7>(nearly
half the nations on Earth) still have a total ban on male
homosexuality and a smaller number also ban sex between women. The penalties
in these countries range from a few years jail to life imprisonment. In at
least seven countries or regions of countries (all under Islamist
jurisdiction), the sentence is death: Saudi Arabia,
Iran<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iran>,
Yemen, Sudan, Mauritania and parts of Nigeria and Pakistan.

Many of the countries that continue to criminalise same-sex relationships
are in Africa and Asia. Their anti-gay laws were, in fact, imposed by the
European powers during the period of colonialism. With the backing of
Christian churches and missionaries, the imperial states exported their
homophobia to the rest of the world. In many of the conquered lands, little
such prejudice had previously existed and, in some cases, same-sex relations
were variously tolerated, accepted and even venerated. This importation of
western homophobia happened in countries like Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria and
Uganda, which now absurdly decry homosexuality as a "white man's disease"
and "unAfrican", while vehemently denying and suppressing all knowledge of
their own pre-colonial era indigenous homosexualities.

Unsurprisingly, the Vatican <http://www.vatican.va/phome_en.htm> and
the Organisation
of Islamic States <http://www.oic-oci.org/oicnew/home.asp> are leading the
fight against the UN declaration. The opposition of the Pope is truly
sickening, depraved and shameless.

Of course, the Vatican has form. In 2004, it teamed up with Islamist
dictatorships in the UN Commission on Human Rights to thwart a
resolution<http://www.ilga.org/news_results.asp?LanguageID=1&FileCategory=44&ZoneID=7&FileID=31>sponsored
by Brazil that opposed homophobic violence and discrimination. The
Holy See is so viciously homophobic that it opposed the UN condemnation of
the murder of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Last week, the papal envoy to the UN, Monsignor Celestino Migliore,
explained the "logic" of this opposition when he
announced<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5268745.ece>the
Vatican's rejection of this week's decriminalisation declaration. The
monsignor argued that the UN declaration would unfairly "pillory" countries
where homosexuality is illegal; forcing them to establish "new categories
(gay people) protected from discrimination." Such laws would "create new and
implacable acts of discrimination ... States where same-sex unions are not
recognized as 'marriages,' for example, would be subject to international
pressure."

In other words, protecting LGBT people against discrimination is an act of
discrimination against those who discriminate. Since the Vatican is against
discrimination, it opposes discrimination against countries that
discriminate. This is the mediaeval mindset of the Pope and his placemen.

Never mind, there are already plenty of countries committed to supporting
the UN decriminalisation declaration.

It will be tabled on Wednesday by France with the backing of all 27 member
states of the EU; plus non-EU European nations including Norway,
Switzerland, Iceland, Ukraine, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine, Armenia and Macedonia.
Russia and Turkey are not signing.

The call for the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships also has the
support of the Latin American states of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador,
Mexico and Uruguay but not, notably, Columbia, Guyana or Venezuela.

Only three African nations – Gabon, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau – are
endorsing the declaration so far. South Africa has not signed up. No
Caribbean nation has offered its support, not even Cuba.

Although New Zealand is committed to the declaration, Australia is not. Nor
is the US. But Canada is a sponsor.

No country in the Middle East, apart from Israel, endorses the declaration,
and in Asia only Japan has agreed to approve it. China and India are silent
on where they stand.

The initiative for the UN universal decriminalisation declaration came from
the inspiring French black activist and gay
rights<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gayrights>campaigner,
Louis-Georges Tin, the founder of the International Day Against
Homophobia (IDAHO). He lobbied the French government, which agreed to take
the lead in getting the declaration tabled at the UN. Member organisations
of the global IDAHO network then petitioned their individual governments to
support it.

What is truly remarkable is that IDAHO is just a loose, unfunded global
grassroots LGBT activist network, with no office, no staff and no leaders.
It has pulled off something that none of the well paid LGBT professionals,
working for often lavishly financed LGBT non-governmental organisations,
have managed to come even close to achieving.

A reminder as to why this UN declaration matters occurred last Friday, a sad
anniversary. On December 5 2007, Makvan
Mouloodzadeh<http://gayswithoutborders.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/%e2%80%9cmakwan-a-letter-from-paradise%e2%80%9d-video-poem-dedicated-to-makwan-moloudzadeh/>,
a 21-year-old Iranian man, was hanged in Kermanshah Central Prison, after an
unfair trial <http://www.iglhrc.org/site/iglhrc/section.php?id=5&detail=797>.
A member of Iran's persecuted Kurdish minority, he was executed on charges
of raping other boys when he was 13. In other words, he committed these
alleged acts when he was minor. According to Iranian law, a boy under 15 is
a minor and cannot be executed. At Makvan's mockery of a trial, the alleged
rape victims retracted their previous statements, saying they had made their
allegations under duress. Makvan pleaded not guilty, telling the court that
his confession was made under torture. He was hanged anyway, without a shred
of credible evidence that he had even had sex with the boys, let alone raped
them. The lies, defamation and homophobia of the debauched Iranian legal
system was exposed when hundreds of villagers attended Makvan's
funeral<http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dlZzexeNSLg>.
People don't mourn rapists. This execution was bare-faced homophobic
judicial murder, according to Arsham Parsi, Executive Director, of the
underground Iranian Queer Railroad <http://www.irqr.net/>, which helps
Iranian LGBTs fleeing arrest, torture and execution.

Makvan's fate is just one example of the thousands of state-sponsored acts
of homophobic persecution that happen worldwide ever year. It shows why
Wednesday's UN declaration is so important and so long overdue.