Erdoğan made his comments during an online address to members of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Monday (1 February), according to Duvar.
Speaking to young people in Turkey, Erdoğan said: “We’ll carry our youth to the future, not as LGBT+ youth, but like the youth from this country’s glorious past.”
He continued: “You are not the LGBT+ youth. You are not the youth who vandalises, but you are those who mend those vandalised hearts.”
He went on to claim that he “respects” all views and identities as long as they are not linked to “terror, immorality, perversion and violence”.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thinks LGBT+ people are ‘poisoning’ the youth
This is not the first time Erdoğan has spoken out against the LGBT+ community – the Turkish president has a long history of making offensive remarks about queer people.
In July 2020, he accused LGBT+ people in Turkey of “sneaking up on our national and spiritual values again” and said queer people have tried to “poison young people” throughout history.
“I invite all members of my nation to be careful and take a stand against those who exhibit all kinds of heresy that our Lord has forbidden, and those who support them,” Erdoğan said at the time.
He urged citizens to “come out against those who display any kind of perversion forbidden by God”.
He also took aim at queer allies. He said those who support “such marginal movements contrary to our faith and culture are partners in the same heresy in our eyes”.
“We will not let you step on human dignity,” he wrote. “We will protect nature and the mental health of our children.”
Erdoğan’s latest comments come just days after four students were detainedand called “deviants” by Turkey’s interior minister over an artwork that reportedly depicted rainbows alongside the Kaaba, a sacred building in the centre of the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
The controversy erupted after Erdoğan appointed a party loyalist to a senior position at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
Student-led pushback erupted earlier this month, as demonstrators, many holding LGBT+ Pride flags, argued that the presidential appointment of professor Melih Bulu as rector went against the university’s 158-year-long history of electing its own.
As the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day, PinkNews remembers all those in the LGBT+ community that were persecuted by the Nazis — and how the pink triangle, used to identify gay or bisexual men in concentration camps, became a symbol for gay rights.
When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party seized power in Germany in July 1933, the dictatorship moved to persecute and murder minority groups, including Jews, LGBT+ people, the Romani people, and political prisoners.
Beginning in 1933, the Nazis built a network of concentration camps throughout Germany, where “undesirable” groups were detained, including Jewish people and gay men.
This persecution continued following the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and, between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi Party systematically murdered six million European Jews — as part of a plan known as “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” — in extermination camps and mass shootings. This genocide is referred to as the Holocaust, or the Shoah in Hebrew.
In total, up to 17 million people, including thousands of gay and bisexual men, were systematically killed at the hands of the Nazis.
Holocaust Memorial Day is held on January 27 annually — marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp — and remembers the millions of people killed by the Nazis and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
Holocaust Memorial Day: Nazi persecution of gay men and the LGBT+ community
Under Nazi rule, the persecution of homosexual men intensified, although gay sex between men had already been illegal since 1871.
It’s estimated that the Nazis imprisoned more than 50,000 gay men, including an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 men who were sent to concentration camps, according to research by historian Rüdiger Lautmann.
Although sex between women was not officially illegal in Nazi Germany, lesbians were also persecuted. Benno Gammerl, a lecturer in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London, tells PinkNews that the persecution of lesbians is “much harder to trace” because they weren’t included in the penal code and there was no specific categorisation of gay women in concentration camps (although some were made to wear a black triangle badge used to denote “asocial” prisoners).
Trans people, too, are known to have been persecuted under the Nazis, including being sent to concentration camps. According to Transgender Day of Remembrance, in 1938 the Institute of Forensic Medicine recommended that the “phenomena of transvestism” be “exterminated from public life.”
Again, Gammerl acknowledges that there have been demands for further research on the plight of trans people under the Nazis, saying: “At the moment, we simply [do] not know enough yet.”
Holocaust Memorial Day: The pink triangle in Nazi concentration camps.
In Nazi concentration camps, a pink triangle was used to identify some gay men. Gammerl, who describes the pink triangle as a “Nazi invention,” says it is “not quite clear” why the Nazis used the colour pink for this purpose.
In concentration camps, LGBT+ inmates were subjected to starvation and forced labour, as well as facing discrimination from both SS guards and fellow inmates.
Pierre Seel, a gay survivor from the Schirmeck-Vorbrück concentration camp near Strasbourg, who passed away in 2005, recalled one traumatising incident in his memoir. Seel wrote that a group of SS guards stripped his 18-year-old lover naked before releasing a pack of German Shepherd dogs which mauled him to death.
“There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste,” Seel wrote in his 1995 book I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror.
“Other prisoners, even when between themselves, used to target them.”
Gay men were also subjected to torture — including forced sodomy using wood — and human experimentation at the hands of the Nazis. There are records of gay men being forced to sleep with female sex slaves, and lesbians being made to perform sex acts on males, as a form of gay conversion therapy.
There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste.
Still, Gammerl argues that, although “there is evidence that homosexuals received worse treatment,” the available records make it hard to claim with certainty that gay people were consistently treated worse than other inmates.
“It is difficult to make definite claims about homosexuals being at the very ‘bottom’ of the camp hierarchy,” he says.
“All inmates were living under the permanent threat of being beaten or raped or killed by guards and there was also violence happening between inmates, some of that was certainly also homophobic.
“So, I would say, all inmates lived horrendous lives far beyond what I can imagine.”
He stresses that, given that Jewish people predominately populated the concentration camps, “one certainly cannot say that homosexuals were treated worse than they were.”
All inmates were living under the permanent threat of being beaten or raped or killed by guards and there was also violence happening between inmates, some of that was certainly also homophobic.
Thousands of LGBT+ people are believed to have been murdered by the Nazis. However, the Nazis’ poor documentation of LGBT+ people means that historians have been unable to calculate an exact estimate. Lautmann has argued that the death rate for gay men could be as high as 60 percent of those detained in concentration camps.
Gammerl also stresses that some Jewish and Romani people killed by the Nazis may also have identified as a sexual or gender minority.
“When talking about numbers, it is important to bear in mind that part of the people who were persecuted as Jews, Communists, Sinti and Romanies, or as members of other groups the Nazis sent to concentration camps, that a certain number of these people may also have been LGBT+,” he adds.
Gay men after WWII and how the pink triangle was reclaimed as a gay rights symbol.
After the end of World War II, the persecution of gay and bisexual men continued. Same-sex sexual activity between men remained illegal in East and West Germany until 1968 and 1969 respectively.
Gammerl notes that, while authorities in East Germany were “more lenient” towards gay men after Word War II, the persecution of gay men in West Germany was “rather intense” in the decades afterwards with “large waves” of arrests in cities like Frankfurt.
“Same-sex desiring men and women had to make sure that they lived their lives not too publicly and for men there was the permanent fear of being sent to prison,” he explains.
There are also accounts of gay men being re-imprisoned using evidence obtained by the Nazis. For decades after the Second World War, the Nazis’ treatment of LGBT+ people went unacknowledged in many countries.
It took until 2002 before the German government apologised to the gay community and annulled the convictions of gay and bisexual men under the Nazi regime. In 2005, the European Parliament passed a resolution including homosexuals as part of those persecuted during the Holocaust.
Poignantly, as the gay rights movement gained momentum in West Germany in the 1970s, the pink triangle started to be used as as a symbol for marking the history of anti-gay violence.
In an act of defiance, the pink triangle was reclaimed — and often inverted, with the tip pointing upwards — as a sign of gay activism. It became known on an international scale during the 1980s, when a six-person collective, called the Silence=Death Project, used an inverted version of the triangle on posters that the group plastered around New York to raise awareness of the AIDS crisis.
The upwards pointing pink triangle was later used by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in its campaigns during the AIDS epidemic. It was also used in memorials to remember LGBT+ victims of the Holocaust in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Sydney.
A lesbian who was forced to flee Zimbabwe after facing death threats from her own family has been denied refugee status in Ireland.
In April 2019, an International Protection Officer (IPO) recommended that the woman – who has not been named – be denied asylum, arguing that her claim lacked credibility.×
The woman said she forced into two separate marriages as a child in Zimbabwe at the ages of nine and 13. She claimed she was forced to flee her home country after her family found out that she was a lesbian, leading to threats of violence.
The woman subsequently brought judicial review proceedings in an effort to have the 2019 IPO recommendation overturned – however, Justice Tara Burns denied her request on Friday (22 January), The Irish Timesreports.
In her appeal, the woman argued that her sexuality was a “core element” of her asylum claim and that the IPO had failed to determine her sexuality when it recommended that she be denied asylum.
Before making a recommendation on her asylum claim, the IPO asked her questions about her sexuality and found that she was not aware of any LGBT+ support groups in either Ireland or Zimbabwe.
The IPO used her responses to questions about her sexuality, and other information about the woman, in reaching a recommendation that she should be denied asylum in Ireland.
In her ruling, Justice Burns said the IPO had reached a determination on the question of her sexuality. Her appeal to have the IPO recommendation overturned was denied.
She can now appeal the matter at the International Protection Appeals Tribunal, the judge said.
The case comes just months after a bisexual healthcare worker who fled anti-LGBT+ discrimination in Zimbabwe had her application for asylum in Ireland rejected because she doesn’t “seem bisexual”.
That ruling sparked international backlash, with the healthcare worker and another queer Zimbabwean woman speaking on condition of anonymity to CNN about their experiences seeking asylum in Ireland.
The Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI) told PinkNews that it is “appalled” by recent decisions for LGBT+ refugees.
“The Irish state assumes to have the authority to validate or invalidate a person’s sexual orientation in order to deny them protection,” said spokesperson Bulelani Mfaco. “Nowhere in Irish law or practice would the Irish state treat its own citizens in such a manner.”
Mfaco said the Irish government “ignores the difficult and life-threatening conditions LGBTQ+ asylum seekers escape in their home country”. He said queer people in some countries could face prison or death if they were to join an LGBT+ organisation.
“The Irish government doesn’t have the authority to validate a person’s sexual orientation,” Mfaco added.
Members of the Honduran Congress voted on Thursday to amend the constitution making it much harder to reverse existing hard-line bans on abortion and same-sex marriage, as lawmakers double down on socially conservative priorities.
Lawmakers voted to require a three-quarters super-majority to change a constitutional article that gives a fetus the same legal status of a person, and another that states that civil marriage in the Central American nation can only be between a man and a woman.
With 88 legislators in favor, 28 opposed and seven abstentions, the proposal will still need a second vote in the unicameral legislature next year before it is enacted.
Currently, all constitutional changes require a two-thirds majority vote of the 128-member body.
Mario Perez, a lawmaker with the ruling party of President Juan Orlando Hernandez, explained during a virtual floor debate that the change will create a “constitutional lock” on any would-be softening of the existing articles.
The country’s criminal code sets out three to six-year prison terms for women who abort a fetus as well as anyone else involved.
Abortion-rights proponents accused backers of the proposal of seeking to cement the current bans.
“This legislation permanently condemns pregnant women or pregnant girls who have been raped or risk dying due to health reasons,” said Merary Mendoza, a researcher with the Honduran women’s studies center CEMH.
Kevihn Ramos, the head of a gay rights advocacy group in Honduras, blasted the lawmakers who voted to make it harder to change the two constitutional articles.
“This reform is the product of a state-imposed religion on Honduras,” he said.
US President-elect Joe Biden should work with global leaders who have sought to shore up a defense of human rights around the world, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2021. His administration should also look for ways to entrench respect for human rights in US policy that are more likely to survive the radical changes among administrations that have become a fixture of the US political landscape.
“After four years of Trump’s indifference and often hostility to human rights, including his provoking a mob assault on democratic processes in the Capitol, the Biden presidency provides an opportunity for fundamental change,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, in his introductory essay to the World Report 2021. “Trump’s flouting of human rights at home and his embrace of friendly autocrats abroad severely eroded US credibility abroad. US condemnations of Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran rang hollow when parallel praise was bestowed on Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Israel.”
World Report 2021, Human Rights Watch’s 31st annual review of human rights practices and trends around the globe, reviews developments in more than 100 countries.READ IT HERE
Roth said that other governments recognized that human rights were too important to abandon, even as the US government largely abandoned the protection of human rights, and powerful actors such as China and Russia sought to undermine the global human rights system. New coalitions to protect rights emerged: Latin American governments plus Canada acting on Venezuela, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation defending Rohingya Muslims, a range of European governments acting on such countries as Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Hungary, and Poland, and a growing coalition of governments willing to condemn China’s persecution of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.
“The past four years show that Washington is an important but not indispensable leader on human rights,” Roth said. “Many other governments treated Trump’s retreat as cause for resolve rather than despair and stepped up to protect human rights.”
Biden’s presidency provides an opportunity for fundamental change, Roth said. He said that the president-elect should set an example by strengthening the US government’s commitment to human rights at home in a way that cannot be easily reversed by his successors.
Biden should speak in terms of the human rights involved as he works to expand health care, dismantle systemic racism, lift people out of poverty and hunger, fight climate change, and end discrimination against women and LGBT people. The slim Democratic Party majorities in the US Senate and House may also open possibilities for more lasting legislation. Biden should also allow criminal investigations of Trump to proceed to make clear that no one is outside the rule of law.
Abroad, to better entrench human rights as a guiding principle, Roth said, Biden should affirm and then act on that principle even when it is politically difficult. That should include:
Curbing military aid or arms sales to abusive friendly governments such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel absent significant improvements in their human rights practices;
Condemning the Indian government’s encouragement of discrimination and violence against Muslims, even if India is seen as an important ally against China;
Re-embracing the UN Human Rights Council, even though it criticizes Israeli abuses;
Voiding Trump’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court, even if he doesn’t like the prosecutor’s investigations; and
Abandoning Trump’s inconsistent, transactional unilateral policy towards China and adopting a more principled, consistent, and multilateral approach that will encourage others to join.
“The big news of recent years isn’t Trump’s well-known abandonment of rights but the less-noticed emergence of so many other countries in leadership roles,” Roth said. “The Biden administration should join, not supplant, these shared efforts. These governments should maintain their important defense of rights, not relinquish their leadership to Washington, while Biden works to entrench a less variable US commitment to human rights.”
We asked four partners to respond to Human Rights Watch’s call on US President-elect Joe Biden and other leaders to prioritize human rights at home and abroad, and why international attention is important to their work. Here are selected quotes:
The United States Dr Tiffany Crutcher, of the Terence Crutcher Foundationand Black Wall Street Memorial in Tulsa, recalls the racist history preceding the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and urges President-elect Biden to tackle white supremacy:
In 1921, it was a lie that incited the Tulsa race massacre where mobs of white rioters burned down the Black community of Greenwood. And almost 100 years later on January 6, 2021, it was a lie that incited mobs of white rioters to storm our nation’s capital to overthrow our democracy. Confederate flags were waved, nooses were erected, and white supremacy showed its ugly head.
Which is why I’m calling on the Biden administration to attack white supremacy head on its first 30, 60, 90 days of taking office. You must prioritize racial justice and you must re-engage on the issues of human rights, and most importantly you must reverse the regressions from the Trump administration. We don’t need another Breonna Taylor, we don’t need another Tamir Rice, another George Floyd, another Terence Crutcher. You must demand a just America and be the change that we so desperately need in this country right now.
Russia Tatiana Glushkova, a board member of the Russian group Memorial Human Rights Center, recalls the arrest on bogus charges of Memorial’s lead researcher in Chechnya, Oyub Titiev, and the difference international attention made in his fate:
The goal was to force Memorial to close its office in Grozny and to complicate the collection of information about human rights violations in Chechnya. However, the case itself was so crudely and clumsily fabricated and so obviously in retaliation for Oyub’s human rights work, that it attracted intense attention from the international community. Oyub’s case was discussed at the Council of Europe, the UN, European parliament, and FIFA. It was discussed in foreign ministries of many different countries, and numerous human rights organizations, both Russian and international. For nine months, foreign diplomats and journalists regularly visited the Shali city court [where Titiev’s trial was held].
Such attention did not escape the authorities of the Chechen Republic. Their most important reaction was, of course, the fact that Oyub’s verdict was relatively light, and also that he was very quickly released on parole. Such a reaction by the Chechen authorities, given their longstanding and deep hatred for Memorial, can only be explained by their desire to quickly turn this page, get rid of this case, of this political prisoner, and of the intense interest of the international community. The result we now have, that our colleague has been free for over a year, would not have been possible without [this] international attention. We are extremely grateful to everyone who took part in this effort.
Cameroon Cyrille Rolande Bechon, head of Nouveaux Droits de l’Homme Cameroun, a human rights organization based in Yaoundé, discusses the international response to the massacre of 21 civilians in Ngarbuh, Cameroon:
This is the place for me to thank the organizations that come together in the Coalition for Human Rights and Peace in the Anglophone Regions, international organizations like Human Rights Watch, [and countries like] France, the United States, who supported us and conveyed the message with us about the need to set up a commission of inquiry into this massacre.
Although this commission has announced its conclusions and a trial opened last December 17 against the four members of the security forces identified by the commission as having participated in this massacre, we’re still dissatisfied. Dissatisfied because the chain of responsibility in this massacre has yet to be established. We would like all those responsible, whether directly or indirectly, including high-ranking army officials, to be prosecuted and sentenced.
Venezuela Feliciano Reyes, a Venezuelan human rights defender deeply involved in providing humanitarian support to Venezuelans in need, on the country’s humanitarian emergency:
The complex humanitarian emergency that has affected Venezuela for at least four years has caused enormous damage to the population, for example, their lack of access to food, health services, [and] education. [These things] also generate mass forced migration because it’s so hard to survive in the country. The root causes include political conflict and years of abuse of power, of erosion of the rule of law. The international community has a fundamental role to play, not only in terms of diplomatic political actions in fora such as the Human Rights Council, the United Nations General Assembly, [and] the Security Council, to help find solutions to the political conflict, but also in providing vital international humanitarian assistance for Venezuela.
This has produced visible effects but is still insufficient. We hope the World Food Program will enter the country this year, for example, since there are reports of Venezuelans facing serious levels of food insecurity. This work is fundamental. This work of political and diplomatic pressure and humanitarian cooperation to restore decent living conditions for the Venezuelan people, and, eventually, to redirect the country towards development and well-being for its people.
Forty-five LGBTQ and feminist archives, museums and public history institutions from 22 countries have endorsed an open letter that outlines the best practices developed by such organizations over the past 50 years. The letter marks the first time a group of this size and geographical reach has put forward a basic charter for their work. The central point: The reconstitution of the lost and erased queer past must be entrusted to independent institutions conceived and directed by the LGBTQI community itself.
Published on Friday, January 8, in the national French newspaper Libération, the open letter calls on the French government to support the efforts of the Collectif Archives LGBTQI to establish an LGBTQ archives and public history center in Paris. Organized in 2017, the collective is a nonpartisan association that has proposed adapting the well-established international model to create a world-class queer history institution. The group has met and negotiated extensively with representatives of the City of Paris. The collective notes that such organizations have already existed for decades and receive significant resources and funding from municipal, regional and national governments in other European capitals, including Amsterdam and Berlin.
The open letter offers a forceful rebuttal to a statement released by the Ministry of Culture on December 29, 2020. Responding to a written question from a member of the French National assembly, the ministry asserted that only government officials at state-run institutions such as French National Archives should be in charge of deciding which organizational records, personal papers and artifacts from LGBTQI history should be preserved and how they should be made available.
“We’re grateful to the organizations in France and worldwide who signed the open letter to make it clear that LGBTQ people ourselves are most qualified to conceive and direct the recovery of our own history,” said Renaud Chantraine, a doctoral candidate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a founding member of the collective. “As their initiatives have so successfully demonstrated, the role of the state is not to displace community-based LGBTQ history organizations, but to serve as a respectful partner in our important cultural work.”
As a next step, the collective has submitted a formal request to meet with French Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot to make its case for support for its project to create an autonomous and independent LGBTQ archives and public history center in Paris.
The Republic of Latvia has voted to define family solely as “a union of a male and female person”, excluding the country’s countless loving LGBT+ families.
On Thursday (14 January) the Latvian parliament, or Saeima, voted 47-25 for an amendment to the constitution stipulating that a family unit consists of a marriage between a woman and a man.
Section 110 of the constitution will now read: “The state protects and supports marriage – a union between a man and a woman, a family based on marriage, blood relation or adoption, the rights of parents and a child, including the right to grow up in a family based on a mother (woman) and father (man).”
The vote came in response to a pro-LGBT+ ruling last year by the constitutional court which confirmed that parents in a family can also be same-sex, and imposed on the state the “obligation to protect and support” them as well.
But National Alliance leader Raivis Dzintars declared that the court had violated its powers, creating a “definition of a family that is not acceptable to the general public in Latvia”.
“Latvia is a democratic country with a diversity of views and respect for every citizen. But at the same time, there are values that have been especially close and even sacred to our nation and its culture for hundreds of years,” he told Skaties.
“One of these values is the understanding of the family, which is based on the father and mother – man and woman – and their children. Until now, such an understanding seemed self-evident, but with the decision of the constitutional court it is questioned.”
The decision represents a huge setback for the Latvian LGBT+ community, and yet another troubling example of the anti-LGBT+ rhetoric sweeping across eastern Europe.
“Today’s vote in the Latvian Parliament threw us back to the times when being an openly homophobic politician was a thing to be proud of,” tweeted activist Kristine Garina of the European Pride Organisers Association.
“Forty-seven members of the parliament voted YES to proceed with ‘same-sex families are not families’ statement to be added to the constitution.”
Latvian politician Marija Golubeva described the move as a “call for discrimination” and an attempt to separate families into right and wrong.
“Support for these changes is a mockery of the principles of a democratic state, and I call for their rejection,” she urged the parliament.
Two years after the World Health Organization and 11 years after France, Israel has finally agreed that being trans is not a mental disorder.
New guidelines, drafted by Israel’s health ministry after three years of consulting with LGBT+ and trans organisations, set out how hospitals and healthcare facilities must treat transgender people.
The guidance directs that hospitals and healthcare facilities must have at least one staff member trained in trans awareness, use a trans person’s correct pronouns regardless of the gender on their official documents, and to provide unisex facilities where possible while allowing trans people to use gendered spaces in accordance with their gender identity.
Ministers also noted that so-called conversion therapy that tries to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity has no ethical or professional basis, as well as confirming that being trans is not a psychological disorder.
“Transgender people, or people on the trans spectrum, is an umbrella term used to describe people who span a broad spectrum of gender identities, distinctive from the one they were identified with and registered as at birth,” the guidance says, according to Haaretz.
“People from this population group are at high risk of suffering physical and verbal violence, discrimination in employment and a lack of access to public resources being treated as social outcasts, which can worsen psychological distress and lead to susceptibility to a high rate of illness relative to the rest of the population,” the guidelines continue.
“This is particularly noticeable when it comes to mental health.”
Ella Amest, co-director general of trans advocacy group Ma’avarim, said the new guidelines are “an important and significant step for the community and for the health system”.
“Many of us require psychological services due to our confrontations with transphobia, beyond the more common reasons experienced by the rest of the population, but the system doesn’t always know how to treat us,” Amest said.
She added: “The guidelines provide those who work in the field with substantive, clear tools and support from above. We hope that more and more public services will adopt this process and formulate similar guidelines together with trans spectrum organisations.”
The new guidance on how to treat trans people in healthcare settings follows joint recommendations, made in December 2020, by the Justice and Social Welfare Ministries that suggested implementing sweeping reforms to trans rights in Israel.
Deputy attorney general Dina Zilber and deputy director general of the Social Affairs Ministry Avi Motola wrote in an interim report that gender markers and names on government-issued documents should be able to be changed via self-declaration.
The policy, Haaretz reported, would have trans citizens’ declarations authenticated by a lawyer or the Administrator General’s Office. Documents and forms should also provide a third gender option, “other”, they advised.
The Czech Republic has ruled against adoptions from same-sex couples registered abroad as anti-LGBT+ rhetoric continues spreading across eastern Europe.
On Monday (11 January) the Czech Constitutional Court rejected a regional court’s proposal to amend a law that prevents same-sex couples registered abroad from adopting Czech children.
Same-sex couples are currently unable to adopt as adoption is restricted to married couples, and same-sex marriage isn’t legal in the Czech Republic. So the Prague Regional Court proposed changes to the wording on private international law, allowing Czech courts to recognise same-sex partners registered overseas.
This was rejected in the new ruling, which suggested it would allow Czech adoption laws to be “circumvented” abroad, according to Expats.CZ.
“Should the legislators set the rules for adoption, they can substantially prevent the rules from being ‘circumvented’ via foreign legal arrangement,” the finding reads.
The Constitutional Court considered the amendment in relation to the case of a registered same-sex couple, a Czech and a Trinidad and Tobago citizen living in the US.
A court in New Jersey approved their decision to adopt two children with the US citizenship, but the men feared legal complications when travelling back to the Czech Republic as a family.
When they asked a local court to recognise the US adoption their request was dismissed, since private international law doesn’t allow for the approval of a decision that goes against Czech law.
The Czech LGBT+ advocacy group We Are Fair expressed regret over the ruling, saying that the decision is proof that the Czech Republic needs to legalise marriage for everybody.
The troubling news follows a wave of anti-LGBT+ sentiment rising across eastern Europe that has seen both Poland and Hungary restrict adoption for same-sex couples.
Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has suggested changing the country’s constitution to explicitly forbid adoptions from LGBT+ couples, while Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, announced in November that a ban on same-sex adoption had “become necessary” due to coronavirus.
“Family ties shall be based on marriage and the relationship between parents and children. The mother is female, the father is male,” declared the Hungarian minister of family affairs as she announced the changes.
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele agreed on December 15 to implement an Asylum Cooperative Agreement with the US government. It allows US immigration authorities to transfer non-Salvadoran asylum seekers to El Salvador, instead of allowing them to seek asylum in the US.
US President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to terminate the deeply flawed agreement, a deeply flawed deal that presupposes El Salvador can provide a full and fair asylum procedure and protect refugees. But for some groups, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, El Salvador provides no safe haven. Its own LGBT citizens lack protection from violence and discrimination.
A recent Human Rights Watch report confirms the Salvadoran government’s own acknowledgmentthat LGBT people face “torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, excessive use of force, illegal and arbitrary arrests and other forms of abuse, much of it committed by public security agents.” Social and economic marginalization further increase the risk of violence. Many LGBT people flee from home.
Between January 2007 and November 2017, over 1,200 Salvadorans sought asylum in the US due to fear of persecution for their sexual orientation or gender identity. In a groundbreaking judgment, a UK court recently granted asylum to a non-binary Salvadoran, finding that their gender expression exposed them to police violence and daily abuse and degradation.
Five years ago, El Salvador seemed poised to champion LGBT rights. It joined the UN LGBTI Core Group. It increased sentences for bias-motivated crimes. Its Sexual Diversity Directorate trained public servants and monitored government policies for LGBT inclusiveness.
Bukele, then a local official, pledged to be “on the right side of history” on LGBT rights. When he ran for president, his promises dissolved. He opposed marriage equality, effectively shut down the government’s sexual diversity work, and refused to support legal gender recognition for trans people. Despite the landmark conviction of three police officers in July for killing a trans woman, violence remains commonplace, and justice out of reach, for many LGBT people.
The Salvadoran government should back a gender identity law and comprehensive civil non-discrimination legislation, prosecute anti-LGBT hate crimes, and reestablish a well-resourced office to promote inclusion and eradicate anti-LGBT violence. It should axe the Asylum Cooperative Agreement.
As things stand, El Salvador fails to provide effective protection to its own LGBT citizens, let alone LGBT people fleeing persecution elsewhere.