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  • Reflecting on the pursuit of equality and non-discrimination on LGBT Day
    May 16, 2013
    Every year on May 17, people all around the world celebrate the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia, while reflecting how to achieve full equality and non-discrimination.
  • Waiting for Minds to Change in Cameroon
    Apr 9, 2013
    “There’s no reason to despair,” Cameroonian president Paul Biya told journalists in January 2013. They had questioned him, at a Paris news conference, on Cameroon’s startling level of arrests and prosecutions for same-sex conduct – by some accounts, the highest number of “homosexuality” prosecutions in the world. “Minds are changing,” Biya reassured the journalists. He mentioned a recent case appeals court ruling overturning the conviction of two transgender people, Jonas K. and Franky D., who had been sentenced to five years in prison.
  • Three Years in Prison for Love... Impunity for Hate
    Feb 28, 2013
    "This will be bloody." So reads a text message received by a Cameroonian lawyer in October 2012. "Tell your accomplice that nowhere in this country will [his children] have peace." Over the last four months, two Cameroonian lawyers have received a series of death threats by email and SMS. The messages have become increasingly vitriolic, with threats to kill the lawyers, their children, and their clients.
  • The Trouble with Tradition
    Jan 11, 2013
    “Tradition!” proclaims Tevye the milkman, in his foot-stomping opening to the musical Fiddler on the Roof. “Tradition!” Tevye’s invocation rings true—what is more reassuring than the beliefs and practices of the past? Which is why the resolution passed by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in September 2012 seems, at first blush, so benign. Spearheaded by Russia, it calls for “promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind.”