The government of Finland has passed legislation that will make it the 20th nation to grant full marriage rights to all of its citizens. “Finland should strive to become a society where discrimination does not exist, human rights are respected and two adults can marry regardless of their sexual orientation,” the centre-right prime minister, Alexander…
As part of CNN’s ongoing series On China, reporter Kristie Lu Stout takes a look at the challenges – some familiar, some remote – that members of the LGBT community face on mainland China. While the report does note that consensual sex between members of the same gender was decriminalized in 1997, followed subsequently by…
Winnie-the-Pooh, one of the most popular and beloved children’s characters, whose stories have been translated into over 60 languages and, who for some twenty years was made into some of Walt Disney’s biggest theatrical releases from the mid-sixties to the present, has come under assault by a group of conservative councilor members in the Central-West…
GENEVA — UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein on Thursday criticized a recent amendment to the Criminal Code of The Gambia that creates a broad and vague offence of “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by life imprisonment. He also expressed alarm at reports of a wave of arbitrary arrests and detention of individuals…
GENEVA — United Nations and African independent human rights experts are hailing a key judgment by the High Court of Botswana asserting that the organization ‘Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana’ (LEGABIBO) should be legally registered as a society by the authorities. The Court rejected last Friday the arguments put forward by the Ministry of…
Months after Uganda’s Constitutional Court overturned its Anti-Homosexuality Act, which prescribed life in prison for many instances of gay sex, nearly identical legislation returned — this time in the Gambia, reports Thom Senzee for The Advocate. In October, Chad took up a sweeping bill that calls for 20-year prison sentences for those percieved to be…
Uganda plans to introduce a new anti-gay law that will withstand any legal challenge, a government minister has told the BBC. It will not explicitly refer to homosexuality, but will rely on the penal code which prescribes a life sentence for “unnatural acts”, he said. Activists say the plan is more draconian than anti-gay legislation…
LONDON — The U.K. boss of HSBC has attacked gay business chiefs who stay in the closet by declaring that it is a failure of leadership for senior executives to conceal their sexuality from their employees. Andrew Clark in The Times reported that Antonio Simoes, who describes himself as “the short, bald, Portuguese, gay guy…
The United Nations human rights office has expressed regret over a recent Singapore Supreme Court ruling to uphold a law criminalizing consensual same-sex relations between adult men, calling the directive a “missed opportunity” to strike down the law. Speaking at a press briefing in Geneva, Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner…
GENEVA — UN Watch has called on UN chief Ban Ki-moon, rights commissioner Prince Zeid, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power and the EU’s Catherine Ashton to condemn yesterday’s UN election of slave-holding Mauritania, misogynistic Pakistan, gay-bashing Uganda and repressive Zimbabwe to its 54-member Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a top U.N. body that regulates human rights groups, shapes the composition of…
