Founder and chairperson of the Red Umbrella Sexual Health and Human Rights Association Kemal Ördek was robbed and raped in their home in Ankara. A police officer at the police station reacted by saying “Enough with this tribe of Lot.”
It has been three days since the attack. At the police station the assailants threatened Ördek by saying, “We know where you live now. They’ll release us anyway and you’ll have to deal with the consequences.” The assailants are free and they continue to harass Ördek on their cell phone.
We met with Kemal Ördek when they arrived at Istanbul for Pride Week and discussed sex workers’ rights struggle. Ördek explains that, as long as it does not include violence, threat, or coercion, sex work needs to be legalized, which would lead to a decrease in sexually transmitted infections since sex workers would be able to freely access healthcare without being discriminated: “Everything starts at legal recognition and guarantees. The current atmosphere of dismissiveness needs to be addressed; dismissiveness also means precarity.” Read More
Turkey: Posters threatening gays with death appear in capital
An Islamist group has pinned posters to walls and posts in Turkey's capital Ankara threatening gays with death, adding to concerns over growing intolerance against homosexuals in the country. The appearance of the posters in Ankara comes just over a week after police prevented Istanbul's annual gay pride march - a successful tradition over the past 13 years - from going ahead, using tear gas and water cannon against activists who showed defiance.
"Should those who engage in ugly behavior and adhere to the practice of the people of Lot be killed?" read posters that appeared in the Turkish capital overnight, referring to Lot, who features in the Old Testament and the Quran. Many Muslims believe that the decline of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah stemmed from the sexual preferences of their inhabitants.
A hitherto low-key Islamist group called the "Young Islamic Defense" claimed responsibility for the poster campaign through a Twitter account @islamimudafaa, saying it was trying to "respond to the immoral actions" of lesbians, gays and bisexuals. Read More
Nigeria: Chief Imam says gay sex is anti-human
A Chief Imam from Nigeria has condemned the acceptance of same-sex marriage by countries such as England, Ireland and the US, labelling it as anti-human. Sheikh Muhammad Khalid, the Chief Imam of Apo Legislators’ Quarters Jumat Mosque, made the comments in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, stating those pushing for same-sex marriage and the countries who had already approved it, were taking a stand “against humanity”.
“I will never support same sex marriage, because of my religion and I am sure that no religion in the world will support it,” he said. “It is against our culture as Nigerians, and against normal human life before the Almighty Allah.” Khalid said that no religion in the world should encourage homosexuality and praised former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan for signing an anti-gay marriage bill into law. Read More
Malaysia: Transgender targeted as religious authorities' influence grows, LGBTI community says
Members of Malaysia's LGBTI community are speaking out about being violently attacked in the moderate Muslim nation, saying the abuse has become common as religious authorities push for more power.
"We have cases of transgender [people] that have been killed," said Mitch, a transgender man. "For us, we call it a hate crime. For the police they don't call it that, because for them these people are not recognised."
The rights of LGBTI people are largely unrecognised in Malaysia. Homosexuality as well as oral sex, sodomy and cross-dressing are illegal in both the criminal code and sharia law. Representatives of Malaysia's LGBTI community said the laws were largely unenforced in the past, but that had changed in recent years. Read More
US: State Department report documents LGBT human rights violations
The State Department’s annual human rights report, 2014 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, notes anti-LGBT persecution and discrimination were pervasive throughout the world in 2014. A compilation of the information from the report regarding sexual orientation and gender identity can be found here.
Included in this compilation is information about new anti-LGBT laws as well as the ongoing persecution and violence facing LGBT people around the world.
"While there is no doubt that equality is rising in some places around the globe, this report makes it clear that many LGBT people are not experiencing the benefits of that progress,” said Ty Cobb, Director of HRC Global. “This report is a critical tool for documenting the violence and persecution faced by LGBT people abroad, and helps to inform our nation's foreign policy.” The situation for LGBT people around the world varies widely, as some countries embrace equality, while in others, LGBT people continue to suffer from discrimination, persecution and violence. Read More
Armenia: The human rights situation of LGBT people in Armenia 2014
Discrimination towards the LGBT community in Armenia continues to be widespread, as the state fails to undertake any actions to reduce the negative attitude towards the LGBT community and to protect their human rights. Rather than promote equality, the leading political party representatives and media affiliated with authorities continue to spread hate speech towards LGBT people, strengthening the environment of impunity in the county.
The absence of anti-discrimination legislation and accountability mechanisms for discrimination cases greatly contributes to the violation of human rights of LGBT people; with this, the lack of implementation for the existing legislation also increases the vulnerability of LGBT people. This report summarizes cases of human rights violations during 2014, records of interviews with LGBT people and data obtained from court cases, internet sources and studies of other reports. Read More
UN Human Rights Office urges Kyrgyz Parliament to reject amendments to laws which institutionalize discrimination against LGBT community
Kyrgyzstan: Lawmakers overwhelmingly support “Gay Propaganda” ban
Lithuania: Weeding out new army recruits by asking if they like flowers
Lithuania has come up with a unique way of ensuring their army doesn't have any gays in it, and that is by asking new recruits whether they like picking flowers. Having reintroduced compulsory military draft earlier this year, randomly selected candidates will now have to report to a military recruitment office in order to be screened for suitability.
The screening, which includes a psychological test, asks 'Does the candidate like picking flowers or has the candidate ever considered a career in the floral industry?' Another question asks if a male candidate has ever desired to be a woman.
Kęstutis Ramanauskas, a psychiatrist at a military recruitment office in Klaipėda, western Lithuania, said: 'After reviewing initial data supplied by the [psychological] test, I try to analyse the person more thoroughly. I use it as a criteria to screen them out. Though it is claimed that [homosexuality] is not a disease, but it is.' Read More
US: The Family Research Council’s anti-trans guide is an embarrassing failure of logic
Conservative Christian think tank and political lobbying organization, the Family Research Council has long traded in dubious claims and hateful rhetoric. New document, “Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement,” is no exception: Authors, Dale O’Leary and Peter Sprigg, fall back on the usual appeals to discredited pseudoscience and decades-old scholarship. But they also embrace a far more surprising referent, the language of the feminist and queer activists they’ve spent decades fighting, even as they back away from their own conceptual and intellectual vocabularies.
While the FRC pitches itself as a defender of a “Christian worldview,” O’Leary and Sprigg claim to be protecting a far more nebulous concept. “In recent decades,” they write in their introduction, “there has been an assault on the sexes.” Read More
Israel: Homophobic op-ed by Islamic leader raises Arab Israeli ire
A homophobic article by an Israeli Islamic leader has sparked a flurry of condemnations by Arab civil society, shining a light on a usually suppressed debate on gay rights. Commenting on the same-sex wedding of Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, deputy head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, launched a scathing attack on homosexuality in an op-ed titled “You make me sick,” published on Yaffa48.com.
“Western societies have reached the lowest of lows,” wrote Khatib, and that society was succumbing "to moral degradation." "It is noteworthy,” he continued, “that suspicious local organizations, tabloids and biased writers have been advocating this perversion. To all those, I say not ‘may you be well and have boys’ but rather ‘may you be miserable and suffer plagues and AIDS, you perverts!'”
Khatib’s comments quickly drew fire from Israeli Arabs on social media.
Al-Qaws, a Palestinian NGO supporting sexual and gender diversity in Palestinian society, argued in a rare statement that Khatib’s concern over homosexuality may indicate a paradigm shift in Arab treatment of the subject: “We wonder,” the organization wrote, “Is this a miserable attempt to exploit the issue of gays for political purposes, or did the Sheikh see change taking place before his eyes and get nervous?” Read More
US: History of the US government’s cruel, malicious campaign against gay Americans
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the dismissal of every single gay person working for the federal government. For the next several decades, the FBI’s sex deviate program investigated all employees suspected of being gay, collecting evidence on their sex lives and turning it over to the Civil Service Commission—which promptly fired them. Gay men were routinely entrapped by police officers, and politicians used knowledge of their enemies’ sexuality for blackmail.
This horrible history has largely been swept under the rug. But Michael Isikoff’s new documentary Uniquely Nasty unearths some of the government’s worst abuses against gay people, including blackmail that led to a senator’s suicide. Read More