We have received this Guyana article
and we would like to be incontact with you. If you think that we could help
forward this new step in Guyana's Constitution just let us know.
At IGLHRC we believe that accountability to the communities we work with is a
fundamental aspect of our work. Thus, we intend to communicate with you once a
year, to report about the work that we have done. Now, we want to report on what
has happened at our Program during the year 2002.
In June, we moved our offices from Buenos Aires to Mexico City. We have legally
registered our Mexico office under the name of "Comision Internacional de
los Derechos Humanos de la Comunidad Gay Lésbica A.C.".
We hope this report will allow you to know more about the work we do and how you
and your organization can make better use of us.
Our mission is to secure the full enjoyment of the human rights of all people
and communities subject to discrimination or abuse on the basis of sexual
orientation or expression, gender identity or expression, and/or HIV status.
During the year 2002, our work in the Latin America and Caribbean region has
covered the following areas:
1. Emergency Response.
More than 4,000 individuals and organizations all over the work are member of
our Emergency Response Network. When notified of violations to the human rights
of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people, they act immediately by
sending letters to the authorities of the country where such violations occur.
We also send appeals for support of law proposals favorable to LGBT communities,
or congratulatory letters in cases where the rights of LGBTs have been
protected.
Many of the individuals and organizations in our ERN forward our
appeals to other networks, multiplying their effect. In cases that fall within
their mandate, we have worked in cooperation with Amnesty International and the
World Organization Against Torture and their networks. The success of
international campaigns of this nature depends on the degree to which the
government can be shamed for its actions and prompted to change. But whatever
the final outcome these campaigns are always excellent tools for:
- raising awareness about human rights viollations in the country where they are
taking place and abroad;
- making activist organization more widely known, giving them better networking
possibilities and more access to resources;
- improving activists' familiarity with humman rights approaches and
documentation skills -as documentation needs to be produced for the campaign to
have credibility and appeal.
Here is a list of some cases for which we launched action alert
campaigns during the year 2002 :
- Threat of eviction against a gay widower (Rosario, Argentina)
- Right to education (Buenos Aires, Argentiina and Santiago, Chile)
- Police brutality (Buenos Aires, San Pedro Sula -
Honduras, Santiago y Valparaíso - Chile, Río Grande do Norte, Brazil;
Aguascalientes, Mexico)
- Homophobic attacks against an MP (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
- Censorship of a student's publication for printing gay materials (Sao Paulo,
Brazil)
- Threats against activists (Chile, Brazil)
- Discriminatory legislation (Tecate, Mexico; Puerto Rico)
- Right to freedom of expression (La Paz, Bolivia)
- Prohibition of Pride Parade (Lima, Peru)
If you feel that the human rights of LGBT people are being violated in your
community, we suggest that you:
Compile as much documentation as possible: testimonies from the victims,
police and medical reports, pictures, newspaper coverage of the issue, etc.
Find out if there is protective legislation in your country and/or
legislation that is being used against LGBT people. Get a copy of the full
text of the law.
Find out which authorities can be held responsible for allowing the
situation to happen and/or who are those who are perpetrating the violations.
Get their names, addresses, fax number and/or email addresses.
Send us the documents and contact information, together with your account
of the situation. We will be in touch with you at every step of the process,
and will make sure that the final text for the campaign has your approval.
In some cases we have sent reports to local Ombudsman offices which support
LGBT rights and want to document violations.
We have also supported activists in the process of submitting legal proposals
to the Parliaments of their countries, like in Colombia (civil unions
proposal) and Perú (anti-discriminatory law). We have assisted in lawsuits
and legal battles by sending comparative legislation and other support
materials and advice to lawyers.
In cases where foreign intervention is not advisable, due to the
conditions of the country, we have strategized with groups based in the region
so that they can communicate with the press or with authorities.
Sometimes we receive complaints which do not result in action alerts. The
reasons can include:
- Insufficient documentation and the impossibility of getting more.
- Strategic decision on the part of the activists - an international campaign
might be inadvisable, unnecessary (because the problem was solved) or not the
best strategy for that particular case.
Submissions to international human rights bodies
One of the functions of international human rights bodies (such as the Human
Rights Committee at the United Nations or the Interamerican Human Rights
Commission [IAHRC]) is to receive complaints from individuals and
organizations whose rights are being violated, and question national
governments about their responsibility.
We cooperate in several ways with local activists who want to take their cases
to international human right bodies, as you will see by the examples below,
also from the year 2002:
Every Action Alert that this Program has produced, as well as other
documented incidents that have not become action alerts, has been reported to
the relevant UN human rights mechanism.
* We have alerted local groups to pending visits by UN Special
Rapporteurs to their country, so they could ask for a meeting with them and
submit their reports.
* We have contributed information about cases in the region to a
detailed report that IGLHRC sent to the recently created Human Rights
Defenders Unit, in the iACHRC.
* Since early 1999, we have been working on the case of Marta
Alvarez, a lesbian who is in prison in Colombia and has requested conjugal
visits from her partner. Marta's is the first case involving discrimination
based on sexual orientation to be taken to the Interamerican Commission on
Human Rights. In this case, we are part of a coalition including the Red de
Mujeres de Colombia, CEJIL (Centro por la Justicia y la Libertad) and Human
Rights Law Group.
This year we had the great happiness of seeing Marta's right to
conjugal visits granted by a local judge in Colombia.
In some cases where the activists and/or the families of the victims did not
want the public attention that the Emergency Response Network brings, we have
sent documentation on the cases directly to UN bodies, which have contacted
the authorities or mentioned the case in their reports.
If you want to work at the international level, let us know. We can share our
experience and help you decide if, when, and how to do it.
2. Human Rights Education.
It is also part of our mission to contribute to the organizational growth of
LGBT groups, to the best of our capacity. Such "technical
assistance" takes numerous forms. We will share a few examples, so you
know what you can ask of us (but if you think that there is something else
that we might do for/with you, don't hesitate to let us know about it Š we
love facing new challenges!).
- We have supported individual activists who have been invited to speak
at panels or seminars, by sending them reference materials and/or contact
information of specialists on issues such as Catholicism and Homosexuality,
international protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation ,
adoption, etcetera.
- We have helped activists doing similar work in different countries to
connect with one another.
- We have helped circulate documents produced by groups in the region and
hosted them in our web-page, such as the report on LGBTs in Paraguay (Grupo de
Accion Lesbico-Gay), Panama (Asociacion Hombres y Mujeres Nuevas de Panama -AHMNP)
and Chile (Movimiento por la Liberación Homosexual - MOVILH)
- We have distributed 36 articles on different issues (from model
legislation to reflections on Human Rights issues, or news aboutachievements
in different parts of the world) to our mailing list,made up of about 1,200
individuals and organizations in the region.
- We have produced three original documents, in Spanish and English, that
were widely distributed and published by several magazines in the region as
well as uploaded into numerous webpages: 2001 Summary
(on LGBT events around the region -January); Lesbians, Health and Human
Rights. A Latin American Perspective (by Laura Eiven,
Alejandra Sardá and Veronica Villalba, August), and Lesbians and the Right to
Development. A Latin American Perspective (by Claudia Hinojosa and Alejandra
Sardá, October).
- Marcelo Ferreyra has produced a chart of the status of
antidiscriminatory and family legislation protecting LGBTs around the world,
that is updated every month. The chart can be downloaded from our website and
also we can send it to any individual or organization interested.
- We have facilitated workshops on Human Rights and Documentation in San
Juan,Puerto Rico; Asuncion, Paraguay ; Tecate and Tijuana, Mexico
Funding
As we often say, IGLHRC is not a funding organization. But we
sometimes can help GLTB organizations get the funds they need to do their
work. For that we have:
- Sent our funders' list to groups throughout the region. The list includes
contact info for organizations in the USA and Europe that are willing to fund
LGBT projects, as well as a few guidelines on how to draft a proposal and the
process of applying for funding in general.
- Distributed information on scholarships to different conferences like the IX
Feminist Encuentro, the 2nd Conference on Women`s Rights and Development and
the World Social Forum. In this last case, IGLHRC sponsored the attendance of
Lohana Berkins, trans activist from Argentina, as part of the Campaign Against
Fundamentalisms (see more about it below)
- We also cooperate with funders like the Global Fund for Women and Astraea to
ensure that lesbian and bisexual activists in the region learnt about
scholarships available for them and got the applications in Spanish or English
(Caribbean).
- We sometimes review funding applications at the request of
activists and send them our suggestions.
Also, this year we had the opportunity to distribute small fundings of our
own. Thus
- We helped transvestites in San Pedro Sula,
Honduras, to rent an office that will also serve as emergency lodging
- We supported Colombian activists working on a civil unions proposal in their
media campaign to counteract attacks from the Right
- We supported Mexican lesbians to produce a poster for the 9th Latin American
and Caribbean Feminist Encuentro
- We contributed to the distribution of the Human Rights Manual
produced by ILGA-LAC (the Latin American branch of the International Lesbian
and Gay Association).
3. Linking Sexual Rights and Social Movements.
* We facilitated the only workshop on lesbian issues included in the
program of the 9th International Women Health Conference and coordinated the
Lesbian Caucus there (Toronto, Canada, 2002 - this work was done by the
authors of the document on Lesbians and Health) and also organized the lesbian
Caucus that met during that Conference (and included many feminist activists
from Latin America).
* During the Women, Human Rights and Development Conference organized by
the AWID (Association of Women in Development), we presented papers on
Activists, Scholarships and Funders; Globalization and its Impact on Lesbian
Struggles in Latin America, and Sexual Rights. We also coordinated the Lesbian
Caucus, and launched a Lesbian Visibility Campaign (funded by Astraea) that
included posters, leaflets (a summary of our document on Lesbians and
Development), stickers and buttons. The campaign was done together with
Cotidiano Mujer (a feminist group in Uruguay), Des-alambrando (a group that
works on lesbian domestic violence in Argentina); Asociacion de Lesbianas del
Uruguay (lesbian group from Uruguay); Coletivo de Lesbicas de Rio de Janeiro
(Brazilian lesbian group); Organización
Ecuatoriana de Mujeres Lesbianas (lesbian group from Ecuador); Puntos de
Encuentro (NGO that works on sexual rights in Nicaragua); GAG-L (lesbian and
gay group from Paraguay); Trabajos y Estudios Lesbicos Chilean lesbian group),
Red Mexicana por las Sociedades de Convivencia (network of NGOs working for
the civil union bill in Mexico City) and the organizers of the 9th LAC
Feminist Encuentro (Costa Rica). We distributed 1,000 stickers, 600 buttons
and about 1,000 leaflets.
* We joined the campaign launched by CLADEM (Latin American Committee to
Defend the Rights of Women) towards an Interamerican Declaration on Sexual and
Reproductive Rights, and participated in activities related to this campaign
in Lima, Peru and the World Social Forum 2002.
* We joined the Campaign Against Fundamentalisms, launched by
Articulacion Feminista Marcosur (a coalition of feminist groups from Uruguay,
Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay) and participated in activities related to this
campaign at the World Social Forum 2002.
Special reports
+ We finished editing a report on Lesbians and Discrimination in Costa
Rica, written by local activists from CIPAC, a local lesbian and gay
organization. This report will be launched during the Second Central American
Lesbian Conference (San Jose, Costa Rica, April 2003)
+ We are still working on a report about impunity, homophobic murders and
police brutality in Mexico, together with Human Rights Watch and the Comision
Ciudadana Contra Crimenes de Odio por Homofobia.
Now that you know us better, we would like to invite you to work (or keep
working) with us. You are always welcome to contact us for suggestions,
questions and proposals.
Warm regards,
Alejandra Sardá and
Marcelo Ferreyra
Latin American and Caribbean Program
International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC)
