Report: LGBTI in Burundi

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The violation of rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in the Republic of Burundi under the African Charter of Human and Peoples' Rights.

A shadow report.

In response to the periodic report of the Republic of Burundi. Presented at the 50th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, 50th Session, October and November 2011, Banjul, The Gambia.

This shadow report is a collaborative effort created and submitted by the Mouvement pour les Libertés Inviduelles (MOLI), the African Men for Sexual and Health Rights (AMSHeR), Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, and the International Human Rights Clinic, and Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

Burundi signed the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights ("the Charter") on June 28,1989 and ratified it on July 28, 1989. The African Commission will consider Burundi’s September 2010 periodic report during the 50th ordinary session of the Commission from October 24th to November 7th, 2011. In its first periodic report to the African Commission, the government of Burundi held up the report as a symbol of its “commitment to the respect for the fundamental rights and freedoms of the human being.”

The Burundian government’s failure to remedy or report on human rights violations on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity seriously undermines this commitment. Every day in Burundi, individuals continue to face criminalization, violence,intimidation and threats because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. We hope that the findings in this report will be useful to the African Commission and also serve as a tool for the promotion and protection of rights under the African Charter.

ACHPR Burundi Shadow Report

Related articles

• Trying not to be afraid in Burundi (madikazemi.blogspot.com)
• Gay Burundian wins UK asylum after eleven year battle (madikazemi.blogspot.com)

Trying not to be afraid in Burundi

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By F. Young

The title says it all.

Burundi’s largest gay rights group is called Humure, which means “Don’t be afraid” in the Kirundi language, but, ironically, its leaders are afraid to come out. None of the three executives interviewed by Xtra use their real names in the media, and only one of them is out to his family.

They weren’t always so guarded.

When the group was founded in 2003, it was called the Association pour le respect des droits des homosexuels (association for the rights of homosexuals), and its members participated publicly in AIDS prevention campaigns. However, things changed in 2009 when gay sex was criminalized for both men and women in Burundi, as a wave of homophobia swept that part of Africa. So, a more discrete name was chosen.

Gay sex had never been a crime in Burundi and, though the group says the law is not actively enforced, it had a chilling effect. The Internet cafe that Humure operated had to close because gays were too afraid to be seen there. According to its coordinator, the group stepped back and focused more on health issues. The law scares a lot of people, he said.

The daily struggles faced by LGBT Burundians are detailed in Forbidden, a collection of printed and online testimonies made by Human Rights Watch in 2009. They talk about how they have been fired from their jobs, beaten by parents and neighbourhood youth and evicted from their homes. They see the new law as a huge step backward.

The U.S. Department of State’s Human Rights Report for 2010 says that discrimination is not always overt or widespread in Burundi. Families sometimes disowned their children, and LGBT’s were often forced to marry persons of the opposite sex due to social pressure, with a Humure survey showing that 90% of men who have sex with men were married.

At least, the situation is better than in several other African countries. With a maximum punishment of two years in jail, Burundi’s law is far less drastic than those of Tanzania and Uganda, for example, where the maximum is life imprisonment, or of Somalia and four other countries, where it is death.

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Rwanda: A leading African light on LGBT human rights?

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Source: The East African

The perception of homosexuality as a “problem” has, for many years, been accepted as the status quo within much of East Africa. But even in this region of the world, where discussing sexuality of any description remains largely taboo, things are slowly starting to change — and the vanguard of that change is occurring in Rwanda.

Dr Aflodis Kagaba is the executive director of Health Development Initiative Rwanda, a health-focused non-governmental organisation located in Kigali that spearheads a coalition of over 40 groups conducting campaign and advocacy work for sexual minorities within the country.

He told The EastAfrican the campaign began a couple of years ago in 2009, when Rwanda started to talk about criminalising same-sex relationships as part of revisions to its Penal Code.

“Around that time in the region, there was a drive to criminalise homosexuality — not only in Rwanda, but also in Uganda and Burundi,” he said. “All the parliaments in the region took up the cause to create articles to criminalise [it], and so when the article was introduced, there was a lot of pressure.

“In the beginning, of course, it was very challenging. We were experiencing hate speech, people phoning in to radio programmes saying ‘Kill them, take them back to the West — they’re not part of us.’ But the media themselves were fanatical at that time — so it required more of an individual engagement, talking to them and discussing the issues involved. It was also important to educate them on some of the documents (in the Constitution) showing that people have rights. So for me, there’s an issue of lack of awareness, and of ignorance of human rights, that needs to continue to be addressed.”

At least in Rwanda, the coalition’s efforts have paid off. After much debate, Rwanda moved to eliminate the criminalisation provision from its draft code last year, and sign the UN Statement on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity — one of only six African countries to do so. (The others are the Central African Republic, São Tomé and Príncipe, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.)

Criminalised

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Video: How the European Union is supporting international LGBT rights

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Source: Intergroup on LGBT rights

On 30 June 2011, the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights held a hearing on LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex) rights in the world. Members of the European Parliament, European Parliament staff, European Commission staff, ambassadors and members of the public heard from human rights defenders, civil society and high-level EU civil servants about the human rights of LGBTI people worldwide.


Andrzej Grzyb MEP, acting Chair of the Subcommittee on Human Rights opened the event.


Andrzej Grzyb MEP: Introduction from LGBT Intergroup on Vimeo.

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Report: LGBTI rights in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi

Naome Ruzindana

Naome Ruzindana is a feminist and founding member of the Coalition of African Lesbians and an Executive Committee member since the outset. She is a passionate activist and human rights defender.

She is also a founding member of Horizon Community Association (HOCA) and the director of HOCA, a Rwandan LGBTI organisation. She has been very vocal and actively involved in the LGBTI movement building and mobilization in East Africa. In Rwanda, she has been very instrumental and played a leading role on challenging the government of Rwanda on the penal code which was intended to criminalize same sex relations.

She presented her paper "The Great Lakes of Africa: Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and their Position Towards LGBTI Rights" at the ILGA panel "The Growing Consensus: Towards the End of Criminalization and Human Rights Violations based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" at the 17th session of the Human Rights Council 7 June 2011 at Palais des Nations, Geneva

Excerpts from Ruzindana's presentation.

Rwanda

In Rwanda, arbitrary arrests of LGBTI citizens and gay activists are increasing. Numerous cases of arrests and abuse of the LGBTI people have gone unnoticed even when we had just concluded a successful national Campaign that decriminalized homosexuality.

The current government prohibits any form of discrimination by gender, ethnicity, race or religion. In December 2009 and after intervention by international gay activists, the Rwandan government denied reports that parliament was considering revising its penal code to criminalize homosexuality. Minister of Justice Tharcisse Karugarama eventually said the government believes sexual orientation is a "private matter" and had no plans to criminalize homosexuality.... We only depend on the statement made by the Minister of Justice....

....good news that our Government has made a step forward within the region to endorse the UN Joint statement on ending acts of violence and related human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity. We applauded that.

Uganda

The controversial Anti Homosexuality bill is one of several bills that Members of Parliament on the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee are set to debate when the House resumes business after the appointments of the Ministers. The bill was nearly enacted if it was not for international condemnation of clauses that stipulated death for LGBTIs.....

The current version of the bill does not stop at criminalizing the consensual same-sex relations, but will also imprison anybody who promotes the rights of LGBTI persons, making “all associations that promote or defend sexual relations against nature” forbidden in great lakes region. The notorious “Kill the Gays” might come back......

In October Last Year, the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone published the names and addresses of presumed homosexuals along with a banner that said, “Hang them.” Of which I was among, with the Late David Kato plus others. Later, they decided to take them to court where they worn an injunction prohibiting such publication inciting to violence against homosexuals. ....

The brutal murder of Ugandan human rights leader David Kato has left the LGBTI community in Uganda in shock, mourning, afraid, lowered their self esteem and brought more fear to their lives.

Burundi

Early last year, Burundi enacted harsh new anti-gay legislation that criminalized homosexuality and made same-sex relations punishable by up to two years in prison. Disturbing updates on the status of LGBTIs in Burundi after the President Pierre Nkurunziza secretly signs legislation—previously rejected by the Senate—that attempts to legislate homosexuality out of existence, and this has pyushed gays more into the closet and gay men say their lives have been "marked with increased discrimination and fear" following Burundi's much-criticized draconian ban......

LGBTI rights in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi

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In Burundi, young trans woman tortured by nuns

Source: ILGA

By Stéphane Tchakam, Charge de Communication Pan Africa ILGA

[Google translation]

The association MOLI just take up the case occurred a few months ago.

Only months later did the Mouvement pour les libertés individuelles (MOLI), Association of Burundi, had the information. A young person aged 17 had suffered abuse at August 15, 2010 Mugera, 25 kilometers from the city of Gitega in Burundi.

That day, jour de la fête catholique de l'assomption, CBR (the Feast of the Catholic Assumption), is called that, goes to Mugera to the orphanage run by nuns, even where she spent a part of his childhood. Evil takes him since, soon accused of theft, obviously wrongly, CBR is tied almost nine hours in a shower of the hotel.

Even innocent, CBR is seen to treat all ills and is seen particularly blame her feminine allure. It was already well at the time this orphan was living with the nuns who had gathered. Life was not easy since the appearance of this young boy was a problem. He behaves like a girl when he is physically a boy.

For staffing reasons, CBR leaves the center and finds a host family in a certain Madame Agnes. There, life is much better since CBR is continuing his studies.

This is only for wanting to visit the nuns that CBR had its mishap. And nothing has settled since the abuse has left its legacy. She still can not use his hands or even to move his forearm. It must be remembered that CBR had been tied securely.

MOLI Executive Director, Christian Rumu which the information relates, indicates that CBR needs care. A complaint was lodged at the High Court of Gitega by the nurse of the young trans. Lawyers Without Borders has examined the case even though Ms. Agnes does not know where this is the case. MOLI is mobilizing to provide necessary assistance to the young person.

Governments still abusing transgender people’s rights

Source: AIDS Accountability International


By Phillipa Tucker, Senior Researcher

Governments worldwide continue to neglect the needs of transgender people with regards to HIV and AIDS. The early results of the AIDS Accountability International Survey on Transgender Issues indicate that almost no countries collect or analyse health data on transgender people thus making them more vulnerable.

Dr. Per Strand, Research Director at AIDS Accountability International’s Cape Town office says:

“This is not an unexpected finding, but if governments don’t correctly monitor and evaluate their epidemics they will make mistakes in their policy, implementation and impact and that is very much what we are seeing is happening for transgender people.”

Senior Researcher Phillipa Tucker explains:

“The lack of focus on the issues being faced by transgender people leaves them vulnerable, not only to HIV infection, but also to other issues such as health risks in operative surgery, side effects and interaction of drugs, relationship vulnerability, income generation, stigma and discrimination and many other aspects that place them at greater risk in the face of HIV.”

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Is Christianity the Key to Gay Liberation in Africa?

Source: African Activist

A progressive Christian pastor in the United States recently sent out a letter advocating that progressive Christians begin missionary outreach in Africa and build alliances with struggling progressive congregations in Africa. This idea originated from two African activists from Zambia and Uganda touring the United States.

Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest originally from Zambia, has been doing research on this for the Political Research Associates, a watchdog group observing right-wing political movements and concentrating on the movements of the "Christian" right. Frank Mugisha is executive director of a Ugandan liberation group called Sexual Minorities Uganda (or SMUG). Together they have laid out the picture of the central African situation: large, rich conservative churches which have received lavish support from right-wing American "Christians," who are there spreading a gospel of hate and building schools where their bigotry is being promulgated.

Meantime, progressive Christians, who do not believe that non-Christians will go to hell and who are sensitive about imposing our culture on others, have avoided missionary activity, leaving small, poor, progressive churches and their pastors in Africa to fend for themselves.

Kapya and Frank say that Africans are spiritual. It would not help for secular rights groups to go to Africa with an eye toward supporting the liberation movement. The support and the language must be Godly in order to be effective. Moreover, since Uganda is about to pass even harsher legislation making it illegal to harbor or support anyone who is GLBTI, the safest and best approach is to go and preach a gospel of love, and give money and support to those who are there already doing it. People need to hear that there is no room for hate in our Christian faith.

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Center for the Study of Global Christianity recently published the Atlas of Global Christianity. The Africa Map (pdf) is available online. In introducing the Africa Map, the Atlas of Global Christianity reports:

Over the past 100 years Africa has experienced the most dramatic demographic religious transformation of any continent. In 1910 Africa was largely animistic in the south and Muslim in the north. There were 11.7 million Christians. By 2010 Christians have mushroomed by 40 times to more than 490 million. Ethnoreligionists dropped precipitously from 58% in 1910 to about 10% by 2010. Yet today’s presence of even a small percentage of ethnoreligionists is an unexpected development, for many in the early twentieth century predicted the complete disappearance of these traditional religions in a generation.

Christianity does not have a monolithic presence in Africa. Christians in Africa now number almost 50% of the population.

Over the past 100 years, Christianity has grown at nearly twice the population rate of Africa.

The claim that only 50% of Africa is Christian is misleading because there are many parts of Africa where 100% of the population is Christian. Here is a clip from the Atlas:

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Desmond Tutu: In Africa, a step backward on human rights

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Source: washingtonpost.com

By Desmond Tutu

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity -- or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God's family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda's parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

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Human rights group urges governement to stop gay deportation

Image by erjkprunczyk via Flickr

Source: PinkNews.co.uk - Feb 8

Human rights groups have called on the British government to intervene in an asylum case which could see openly gay Alvin Gahimbaze deported to Burundi.

Refugee charity, ‘Everyone Group’ told Pinknews.co.uk:

“We have just received news that Alvin Gahimbaze, has been removed from his home by the British authorities and taken to a London detention centre to await deportation back to Burundi after the Border Immigration Agency turned down his application for asylum.”

Last year the government of Burundi criminalised homosexuality, punishing offenders with up to two years in prison.

“His life will be in serious danger if he is deported back to Burundi due to the ethnic clashes and the serious institutional homophobia,” the charity added.

EveryOne Group has contacted the British Home Office and is now appealing to the British Government to release Mr Gahimbaze as soon as possible and cancel the deportation order.

‘Alvin’, explain the group's co-presidents, Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro and Dario Picciau, “is a young man from the Tutsi ethnic group who fled Burundi with his sister when he was still a boy. The rest of his family was massacred during the ethnic clashes and he has lived in the United Kingdom since 2000. Though his sister has been granted permanent residence in the UK, Alvin now faces deportation.”

Last year over five thousand people signed a petition that would end the deportation of LGBT asylum seekers to homophobic countries. The government defended its current position, explaining:

"Enforced returns to any country will only be undertaken where, after very thorough examination of the asylum claim, it is decided that the individual would not be at risk of execution, torture, unjust imprisonment, or other forms of persecution.

"Where an asylum application has been refused, there is a right of appeal to the Asylum Immigration Tribunal or an opportunity to seek judicial review through the higher courts."

"The government recognises that the conditions for lesbian and gay people in some countries are such that there may be individuals who are able to demonstrate a need for international protection.

"However, there can be no presumption that each and every asylum seeker of a particular nationality who presents themselves as being lesbian or gay should automatically be afforded protection in the UK.”

Stonewall Housing says it has seen the number of asylum seekers and refugees approaching it for advice double in the last year.

Interview with Scott Long, director of Human Rights Watch's LGBT Rights Division

Source: Rex Wockner

He's arguably the most knowledgeable person on the planet about international LGBT issues. Scott Long, director of Human Rights Watch's LGBT Rights Division, and I chatted recently in the organization's offices in the Empire State Building. There's a lot of background and context on the Ugandan "kill the gays" bill about 1/3 of the way into the interview.

Rex: There (are) about 195 countries in the world, and over the years I've asked you random questions about probably a third of them, and I can count on one hand the number of times you didn't pretty much have the answer on the tip of your tongue. How is that possible?

Scott: We do a lot of research. Basically, human rights work is about information. It's like journalism. It's about producing information that's accurate and usable for people and for policymakers, and getting it out there. So, our reputations, our credibility, our effectiveness ride on our ability to know what's going on in the world. ... I think human rights workers, whatever the field, are kind of glorified nerds in many ways. But it's also satisfying in that if we know what's going on, if we're on top of the facts, we can actually use the facts to, I hope, improve people's lives from time to time.

Rex: I'm also asking about the inside of your brain. How does it literally fit?

Scott: Well, the inside of my brain is not terribly organized, I have to say. It's like my office. It's a lot of things strewn around in different places. But it's accessible. I mean, I spend a long time not just accumulating facts (but) getting to know people in different movements around the world and figuring out who else in the world out there has information on, you know, Moldova or Uganda or Canada or India. And probably that's the most important thing. It's not so much that I know all of these things, but over time I've gotten to know the people out there who do know this stuff because they live with it every day. And being able to access what they know and their experiences and their, you know, strategic political senses -- it's obviously invaluable to me. It's also really a tremendous privilege to see the folks out there who are planning and building their own movements in their own countries, and really do know what's going on there.

Rex: ... One of the most challenging aspects of my job is when people contact me from -- it doesn't matter which, you know, developing country it is (and) I have to somehow be able to make a determination if they're heroic, altruistic, amazing activists taking on these tasks under incredibly difficult conditions, or if ... they have some ulterior motive for doing what they're doing. Maybe they want to get invited to conferences, all expenses paid, in foreign countries or maybe they want to emigrate. ... How do you separate the good guys from the not-so-good guys in this work?

Scott: Well, it used to be a lot harder than it is. I remember years ago when I was at IGLHRC (International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission), we were working with this group which had contacted us by letter, basically -- this was before e-mail was widely disseminated across Africa. They were in eastern Nigeria and they had stories of lesbian women being targeted by these roving gangs of young men who operate in many Nigerian cities, and these were really compelling stories. And I'm still convinced that there was kind of a level of truth to some of what was going on. But as time went on, their own accounts of their own activism began to get just disproportionate to what I thought was possible in provincial Nigeria. I mean, this was the mid-1990s and they were telling stories of basically doing consciousness-raising workshops for lesbians across the Niger Delta and, as I began to look more closely at the material they were sending to us, there were little things like where newspaper articles about their work didn't match the typeface of the rest of the Xeroxed newspaper page that they were sending us and, you know, by talking to colleagues who knew Nigeria at the time much better than I did, who knew the kind of overall shape of civil society in Nigeria, it became clear that a lot of what they were feeding us was really a fraud. But that was at a time when, you know, there probably wasn't another group within 200 or 300 miles of there that was doing work on LGBT issues or that cared about them in any way. I mean, much of the feminist movement in Nigeria at the time wouldn't have touched these issues with a 10-foot pole. That's not true anymore in most places. There are networks who can vouch for people and who can help build people's capacity on the local level to become more credible and to be more in touch with the facts so that now, if somebody contacts us from Rwanda ... there are human rights organizations, there are activists in surrounding countries like Burundi, who can help us vouch for what some of these isolated voices are saying.

It's not always true though. When I got involved in the cases in Egypt, which took up a good part of three years of my life, basically -- I often tell the story: One night when I was sitting in my office alone and I got this e-mail from an anonymous person ... in Cairo who said that his roommate was one of dozens of people who'd been arrested on the Queen Boat. And it took a week or so of reading the Cairo press -- and we had nobody in the office then who spoke Arabic; this was when I was working with IGLHRC, so we had to call in translators -- before we could really determine that what he was saying was true. About a year and a half ago, I was sitting here again late one night and I had Yahoo! Messenger on. This guy started buzzing me and at first I thought it was just a random annoyance, the equivalent of a penis-enlargement spam, and it turned out that he was a 21-year-old guy living in Gaza whose parents were trying to kill him and he was in hiding and really had nowhere to turn. And we spent ... about a year trying to get him out of Gaza. It was at a point where the Israelis had closed all the border crossings around Gaza. He'd actually gotten a visa to Lebanon but he couldn't leave. Finally, after a year or so, he managed to escape into Egypt and then he got arrested in Egypt; he finally wound up in the Netherlands. But there was a certain level, in that case, of just kind of intuitively having to trust that this was someone who really was in trouble.

I think a lot of the folks who we contacted in Iraq, it was the same way. There was no way of exactly figuring out whether they were really in trouble or just wanted a quick exit. But the situation was urgent enough that you kind of had to believe them. You had no choice. And at moments like that, all you have to go on, honestly, is your own gut and a certain kind of basic trust in humanity. And I wouldn't want to reach the point where -- you know, there are a lot of liars and there's a lot of fraud and there's a lot of self-promotion -- but I wouldn't want to reach the point when you lose that kind of basic trust in humanity because unless you have that, the whole notion of human rights, you know, it doesn't mean much.

Rex: What are two or three LGBT or ... sexual-minority issues going on, on the planet right now that keep you from falling asleep at night? Just two or three that you are particularly obsessed with right now.

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Burundi: Gays and Lesbians Face Increasing Persecution

Source: Human Rights Watch

(Bujumbura) - An April 2009 law that criminalizes homosexual conduct threatens to exacerbate the deplorable treatment of gays and lesbians in Burundi, Human Rights Watch said in a multimedia project published today.

The project, "Forbidden: Institutionalizing Discrimination against Gays and Lesbians in Burundi," consists of printed and online narratives, photos, and voice-recorded testimonies of Burundian gays and lesbians that bring to life the daily struggles faced by the small lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community in Burundi. Members of the community talk about how they have been fired from their jobs, beaten by parents and neighbourhood youth, and evicted from their homes.

The LGBT population had just begun to speak up and organize - demanding an end to discriminatory treatment in workplaces, schools, and homes - when the Burundian government struck back, adding to the criminal code in April a provision that institutionalizes such discrimination by criminalizing "sexual relations with persons of the same sex." Individuals convicted under the new law can be sentenced to up to two years in prison.

"The government needs to listen to these voices to understand the harm it is doing to Burundians with its state-sanctioned discrimination," said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "The government should rescind this law and instead work to promote equality and understanding."

The testimonies presented in "Forbidden," alongside Martina Bacigalupo's powerful photographs, give a public platform to a population in Burundi that has long been silenced.

The individuals interviewed for "Forbidden" described Burundi's new law as a huge step backward. (Some names have been changed in the report for reasons of privacy and protection.) Cynthia, a 25-year-old waitress, told Human Rights Watch: "I was shocked when I heard about the new law against homosexuality. I want them to give us liberty. We are people like everyone else. It's God who created us. The law won't change us."

Even before the law was passed, Burundian LGBT people faced significant obstacles to acceptance by society, as recounted by the 10 people interviewed for this project. Carine, for example, a 37-year-old lesbian from a small town in Burundi's interior, describes how she lost a teaching job when her sexual orientation was discovered. She was harassed at another job by a male colleague, who on one occasion locked her in a room and threatened to kill her.

Pascal, starting when he was 5 years old, was beaten regularly by his parents, who considered him effeminate. As he said: "They thought that by beating me, they could change me." Many of the people interviewed by Human Rights Watch, most of them young, had been kicked out of their homes or disowned by their parents.

Human Rights Watch called upon the government of Burundi to listen to the voices of Burundi's gays and lesbians, and to urgently reform the criminal code so as to end state discrimination against this group of Burundian citizens.

• FORBIDDEN: Gays and Lesbians in Burundi (PDF)
  

Is Homophobia the New Anti-Semitism?

On May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. That's why gay-rights activists chose May 17 for the International Day Against Homophobia, a worldwide series of events, now in its fourth year, designed to spotlight the terrible abuses gay and lesbian people face in much of the world. (In what might be seen as a prescient tribute to Larry Craig, it goes by the acronym IDAHO.) Even before this year's IDAHO began on Sunday, events in Moscow offered a lurid demonstration of why global homophobia needs our attention.

Moscow gay-rights activists had planned a march to coincide with the finale of the ultra-campy Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday. It was a brave and risky undertaking -- in the past, gay-rights demonstrators in Russia have been met with violence from both police and right-wing thugs. Moscow's mayor has called gay-rights marches "satanic," and his spokesperson told journalists that the activists threatened "not only to destroy the moral pillars of our society but also to deliberately provoke disorder, which would threaten the lives and security of Muscovites and guests of the city." The Independent reported that organizers hid out in a country house to avoid arrest in the days leading up to the march, then dodged police roadblocks to make it into the city.

In the end, the protest was quashed before it could begin. "The demonstration lasted for about a minute before the police set upon them from all sides, clambering through the shrubs and knocking news cameramen out of the way to seize the demonstrators, pin their arms behind their backs and drag them off into waiting buses and patrol wagons," reported the Los Angeles Times. Added The Telegraph, "Some activists were detained for doing little more than talking to reporters, including a female campaigner who had her glasses and shoes torn off and her dress pulled up above her waist as she was carried screaming into a bus." Far-right anti-gay demonstrators were allowed to have their own event elsewhere in the city.

As the organizers of IDAHO know, this kind of official repression is all too common. Opposition to homosexuality in conservative countries is, of course, nothing new. But right now, partly in response to the increasing visibility of gay rights in the West, we're seeing a ratcheting up of anti-gay demagoguery and persecution throughout the world.

The hatred comes in many guises and from many different directions. But there are some underlying themes, enough so that it's possible to talk about global homophobia as a single concept, akin to anti-Semitism. Indeed, worldwide, the rhetoric of homophobia recapitulates the tropes of classical Jew hatred. Gay people are seen as a subversive internal enemy with dangerous international connections. Even in places where they've been cowed into near invisibility, they're viewed as having an almost occult power. They represent modernism and cosmopolitanism, the bete noirs of every type of fundamentalism.

In part, global homophobia is a reaction to the great strides the gay-rights movement has made internationally. Almost every developed nation -- including, once Obama took office, the United States -- signed onto a recent United Nations declaration calling for the decrimalization of homosexuality worldwide. The European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights recognizes gay rights. In 2006, at a conference that led to the creation of the International Day Against Homophobia, Louise Arbour, then the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights, denounced anti-gay legislation in forceful terms and dismissed the kind of cultural relativist arguments often used to justify repressive laws.

"In my view," she said, "respect for cultural diversity is insufficient to justify the existence of laws that violate the fundamental right to life, security, and privacy by criminalizing harmless private relations between consenting adults. Even when such laws are not actively enforced, or worse when they are arbitrarily enforced, their mere existence fosters an atmosphere of fear, silence, and denial of identity in which LGBT persons are confined."

Meanwhile, just as the gay-rights movement has been globalized, so has the religious opposition. "There are currently two major sources of homophobic thought globally," says Hossein Alizadeh, the Iranian-born communications coordinator of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. "One is primarily Christian conservative movements that are mainly based in the United States. We see a lot of that fitting into the hatred and violence in Africa, the missionaries that go into different African countries and bring with them the message of hate. The second is Islamic fundamentalism."

In many Muslim countries, homosexuality is denounced as a decadent and imperialistic imposition. "Almost on a weekly basis you see there's some sort of article published in the Muslim world blaming the United Nations for promoting homosexuality and basically destroying the fabric of the society," Alizadeh says. Indeed, such rhetoric sometimes comes from the anti-colonialist left as well as the religious right. In a 2002 article on what he called the "Gay International," Columbia University professor Joseph Massad presented the global gay-rights movement as an instrument of Western hegemony. "Following in the footsteps of the white Western women's movement, which had sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women's movements in the non-Western world … the gay movement has adopted a similar missionary role," he wrote.

In Iraq, the scapegoating of gays and lesbians as agents of the West has been particularly deadly. "The country was invaded back in 2003, and ever since then things have been going south rather than getting better," Alizadeh says. "People have to blame somebody, and gays seem to be the easiest target. There are lots of comments about how homosexuality did not exist in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. People think the least they can do in order to protect their culture is just to go after gay people and kill them."

Terrible abuses of gays and lesbians are certainly not limited to the Muslim world. In Africa, despite the near-invisibility of gay people on much of the continent, there's a full-blown gay panic underway, much of it stoked by evangelicals with ties to the American right. Last month, Burundi passed draconian anti-gay legislation, making gay sex punishable by up to two years in prison. Nigeria is currently considering a bill that would criminalize the "coming together of persons of the same sex with the purpose of leaving [sic] together as husband and wife or for other purposes of same sexual relationship." In Uganda, where same-sex relations are already punishable by life in prison, Christian-right organizations have been accusing homosexuals of "recruitment," leading to calls for even more punitive anti-gay legislation.

Scott Lively, a key figure in the global anti-gay movement, spoke in Uganda in March. Indeed, wherever one sees really furious Christian anti-gay activism, one often sees his name. Lively is the co-author of a book called The Pink Swastika, which posits that Nazism was a homosexual movement and that the modern gay-rights movement is its direct descendent. He's also written a book called The Poisoned Stream, a kind of anti-gay Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which traces the machinations of "a dark and powerful homosexual presence" through "the Spanish Inquisition, the French 'Reign of Terror,' the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American Slavery."

Lively has been particularly influential in the former Soviet Union. "The Pink Swastika has become Lively's passport to fame among anti-gay church leaders and their followers in Eastern Europe, as well as Russian-speaking anti-gay activists in America," reported the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007. "Lively frequently speaks about the book and his broader anti-gay agenda in churches, police academies, and television news studios throughout the former Soviet Union."

Lively is close to Pastor Alexey Ledyaev, whose New Generation Church, an influential megachurch based in Riga, Latvia, has satellites all over the region. As the SPLC reported, he's known for staging large-scale Christian rock operas "replete with lasers, smoke machines, and spandex-clad actors in ghoulish makeup. One of the rock operas, which young Russian-speaking anti-gay activists promote on video-sharing web sites, features a hero character wearing a tuxedo battling men in black tights armed with tiki torches. Over heavy-metal guitar riffs, a military-like chorus sings of ‘victory over the gays.'"

This aggressive, even obsessive homophobia, more than simple religious traditionalism, is the context for the violence in Moscow on Saturday. Anti-gay bigotry, like anti-Semitism, has its local particularities everywhere it surfaces, but it's also increasingly part of a bigger phenomenon, one knit together by overarching conspiracy theories. The activists behind IDAHO have made an important start in publicizing the international character of the problem. Worldwide, those most fervently opposed to gay rights are organizing across borders. The people standing up to them need to do so as well.

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Britain speaks out against new Africa law

Britain's international development minister Ivan Lewis has strongly condemned the recent decision by Burundi to criminalise gay sex.

During a visit to the small country in Eastern Africa which shares a boarder with Rwanda, the minister repeatedly called for a change of policy at the highest official levels and to the media over the new law, which was passed by the Burundian President on 22 April.

It makes consensual same-sex relations a crime for the first time in the country's history, punishable by up to two years in prison and up to an $80 (about £50) fine.

During a meeting with Burundi's president, Pierre Nkurunziza, Lewis warned him he was out of step with global opinion.

Lewis said: “In any society, it should be totally unacceptable to criminalise anyone because of their sexual orientation”.

“I have raised with the president the UK’s concerns about the new penal code which criminalises gay sex.

“The UK government has made it clear to the president and the government of Burundi that this legislation is unacceptable and should be repealed as a matter of urgency.

“It is important to highlight that the UK Department for International Development campaigns and supports a broad range of human rights across the world.

“It is my sincere hope that the government of Burundi listens to the UK, the EU and other members of the international community and repeals this law.

“It must allow Burundi’s gay and lesbian community to live their lives free from harassment, intimidation and the threat of jail.”

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Global Gaze: When Falling in (Same-Sex) Love is a Crime

Click image to enlarge map

By Jolly

In the last installment of the Global Gaze series, in which we looked at the gay rights struggle in sub-Saharan Africa, I alluded to the fact that one of the issues that gay rights activists struggle with is the criminalization of homosexuality in many parts of the world. I also referenced a declaration in the UN about LGBT rights. In the time since writing that, I’ve been thinking more and more about the phenomenon of criminalized homosexuality around the world and how easily taken for granted this issue can be in modern queer community in the US and throughout the West. What follows is a look at what it means when being gay is illegal around the world

In terms of the international community as a whole, UN documents and institutions are fairly quiet on the issue of criminalized homosexuality. This isn’t that surprising, since such instruments rarely address issues affecting sexual minorities around the world in general. While this may seem like a simple matter of terminology or oversight, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, put it best when he said, “We know that when a community is left out of the mainstream of international life, it is very difficult for its members to preserve even the most elementary human rights.”

The United Nations Declaration on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, which was sponsored by the French, backed by the European Union and presented to the UN General Assembly in December, is meant to address this. Article 11 of the declaration says, “We urge States to take all the necessary measures, in particular legislative or administrative, to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention.”

This proposal, of course, resulted in intense debate within the UN. First of all, it should be noted that General Assembly declarations, unlike international treaties and conventions, are legally non-binding. This means that states aren’t actually bound by it if they sign it, though approval does have significant symbolic and rhetorical value. 66 states, including all of the members of the EU and other Western countries, except for the US, signed it right away. The Obama administration has already said that the US will sign the declaration in the near future.

Shortly after its presentation, the Vatican joined many Arab and African states in criticizing the declaration. In a formal statement, 57 countries emphasized many common arguments against having human rights for homosexuals, namely that it could lead to “the social normalization, and possibly the legitimization, of many deplorable acts including pedophilia,” and that the criminalization of homosexuality is a domestic issue and therefore interfering in such policies violates the sovereignty of individual states.

Until the original declaration passes or is superseded by a legally binding document, scholars like Phillip Tahmindjis have pointed out that any norm regarding sexual orientation “has to be gleaned by inferences drawn from language addressed to issues of non-discrimination in the way they are implemented.” This is exactly what happened in 1994 when the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that the criminalization of homosexuality and homosexual acts is a violation of international non-discrimination laws in the famous case known as Toonen v. Australia. The case was brought by Nicholas Toonen, an Australian man who was challenging anti-sodomy laws in Tasmania, the last region of Australia to enforce such a law. The HRC ruled that passing different laws for gay men regarding sexual activity was a violation of international law because it made gay men unequal before the law and in terms of its implementation.

Despite this interpretation of international law, as of this moment homosexuality and/or homosexual acts remain illegal in 77 countries and are considered offenses punishable by death in seven: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, Sudan, and Yemen. (As a matter of perspective, it’s important to remember that anti-sodomy laws weren’t overturned country-wide in the US until 2003 when the decision in Lawrence v. Texas was handed down). This criminalization is not, in most countries, merely an antiquated law which is no longer enforced, but rather legislation which is actively supported and carries serious punishments. In fact, countries throughout the international community continue to pass additional and increasingly harsh laws against homosexuality and homosexual acts as a backlash against greater condemnation of such policies.

A recent example of this can be found in Jamaica. Last month, despite international and domestic pressure, Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Godling supported a new sexual offenses bill and promised to “protect” the country from homosexuality. “We are not going to yield to the pressure, whether that pressure comes from individual organizations, individuals, whether that pressure comes from foreign governments or groups of countries, to liberalize the laws as it relates to buggery,” Golding told Parliament. As I mentioned last time, Burundi, among other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, has also made a bid toward criminalizing homosexuality and passing tougher laws as well.

While all of this legal jargon is important and has an impact on individuals around the world, it’s also vital to take a look at the roles these laws play in people’s everyday lives. The Middle East is a region which I haven’t directly addressed yet in a Global Gaze column. The region contains, however, one of the most compelling stories regarding the impact that anti-gay laws have on sexual minorities around the world.

Israel stands with only Jordan, Turkey, and Cyprus as countries in the region in which homosexuality is legal. Israel goes beyond this and is considered the leader in terms of LGBT rights in the area. This creates a very real dilemma of identity for Palestinian sexual minorities living in areas such as Gaza and West Bank. In one of the most dramatic embodiments of the conflict between multiple identities that all LGBT people feel to some degree, young gay and lesbian LGBT Palestinians are forced to choose between living with their families and communities and hiding their sexuality in the face of anti-gay laws, or sneaking into Israel where the laws are much more tolerant and risking deportation and harassment due to their ethnic identity.

And the situation only gets more complicated as Israel’s relationship with its neighbors fluctuates, meaning it gets harder and harder to enter the country at all. Also, these young men and women cannot apply for asylum because Israel interprets international refugee law, and therefore asylum policies, to read that they do not apply to Palestinian nationals.

This scenario, as sad as it is, also shows the power that coming together as a global community can have. Despite their obvious differences, Israeli gay rights groups have helped to protect LGBT Palestinians and keep them in the country as best they can. As Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli gay rights activist, said in an interview last year: “The struggle for our rights is worthless if it’s indifferent to what’s happening to [gays in the occupied Palestinian territories] a kilometer from here.”

So what can the international community do about this issue? Encouraging states to sign the declaration before the UN is important, of course. Usually in the case of a declaration, national NGOs in signatory countries can use such an action to hold countries to their word and encourage them to fully implement the ideals enshrined in the declaration in their domestic legal systems. In this case, however, this strategy is less effective, as most of the signatories have already abolished their anti-gay laws. The focus, therefore, must be on trans-national advocacy to get additional states to agree to sign on.

The UN Human Rights Committee, the body which ruled in the Toonen case, now routinely requests information from states regarding what they’re doing to prevent, address, and prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation domestically. It urges states not only to repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality but to go a step further and prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in their constitutions and laws. States and activists should support this work and encourage it to continue.

Beyond this, it’s up the international queer community to stay vigilant and monitor individual states for abuses. When your very existence is considered a crime against the state, not much hope exists for living a free or open life. It’s up to all of us to remain mindful of our LGBT brothers and sisters across the globe and support them in any way possible until we can achieve a world in which we are all free to be who we are.

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