Fourteen nations and regions with large Muslim populations have laws providing for the death penalty for same-sex activity or otherwise allow such executions. Many fewer countries actually impose the death sentence — by this blog’s count, probably five of them. Continue reading
About 200 LGBT people worldwide have been arrested in recent weeks in anti-LGBT police actions in southeastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Continue reading
The Erasing 76 Crimes blog has updated its sad tally “100s are in prison for being gay” — one of the blog’s most frequently visited pages. In the past, the blog tried to keep track of individual cases of LGBTI prisoners and defendants, but the number of cases turned out to be too great to continue. … Continue reading
LONDON – A group of up to 17 countries led by Belarus has blocked a plan to include the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender communities in a new urban strategy drawn up by the United Nations, according to sources close to negotiations. Thompson Reuters Foundation published the story Oct. 11-12. The headline was: … Continue reading
Kevin Schumacher, OutRight Action International’s program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, reports: The Iranian government plans to host an international human rights conference in the city of Qom in August to discuss Islamic Human Rights principles, which will exclude LGBT rights and other issues “that are based on Western cultural standards and … Continue reading
By Colin Stewart Ten nations with large Muslim populations have laws providing for the death penalty for same-sex activity. Only a few actually impose the death sentence. Exactly how many is a difficult question. The 2016 State-Sponsored Homophobia report from ILGA, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, lists 13-14 places that threaten … Continue reading
Gay and trans Iranians must make an excruciating choice on reaching age 18 — join the army, where they encounter intense homophobia and sometimes rape, or submit to an intense invasion of their privacy in order to qualify for an exemption from military service on the grounds of being gay or transgender. If they qualify, … Continue reading
Public recognition of the human rights of LGBTI people remains rare in the many Middle Eastern and North African countries that still have laws against same-sex intimacy. In most of those countries, even advocacy of those rights is unusual. Such advocacy is mostly underground, online or abroad for Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Syria … Continue reading
By Jack Flanagan Iran has rejected a series of proposals that the country stop abusing LGBTI youths. The proposals, released Feb. 4 by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, were discussed during a January meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, between committee members and Iranian delegates. According to 6rang, an Iranian lesbian and transgender … Continue reading
LGBTI news in brief from Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Singapore and Uganda — all of them countries that have anti-LGBTI policies or have considered adopting them. These items are excerpted with slight modifications from UNAIDS Equal Eyes recaps of the world’s LGBTI-related news: The UK’s Human Dignity Trust and the Commonwealth Lawyers’ Association warned that the … Continue reading
