Human Rights

Let’s take stock and reflect back on our victories great and small as well as the setbacks over the decades.

The law prescribes a maximum penalty of 14 years’ imprisonment for consensual gay sex among adults.

You can be fined ““up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct.”

“”The climate of fear worsened over the last 12 months, with people perceived to be gay or lesbian increasingly targeted,” said Amnesty’s West Africa researcher Sabrina Mahtani.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter drew cheers Monday for his remarks supporting human rights and the LGBT community. Carter, 89, speaking to a packed house at Grand Rapids Community College, responded to one particular question about LGBT rights, and had this response: “I never knew of any word or action of…

BOSTON — As the nation celebrates National LBGT Pride Month, U.S. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance, on Friday introduced legislation that would affirm LGBT human rights are a foreign policy priority for the U.S. government.

More than 60 years ago, the United Nations declared December 10 International Human Rights Day — partly a reaction to the horrors World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 set out to define basic human rights and freedoms afforded to any person, regardless of race, gender or ethnicity.

Today marks 14 years since the day we lost Matt Shepard. I know from the conversations I’ve had with many of you that those terrible days in October 1998 echo in your memories: where you were, how it felt, the fears, the outrage and the questions you were left with.

LGBTQ people only desire to realize their right to love each other, not impose it on others. Don’t fool yourself, the mob rule of democracy will shift the discussion to a determination of what marriage means for the majority, rather than the protection of minority rights by judicial rule of law. This protection is inherent in the U.S. Constitution, but many religious followers do not understand this, or even when they do, they do not value it or accept it.

Continuing a series of posts on the significant developments in the LGBT community in 2011, we saw an increased impact of the work of the UN Human Rights Council, particularly its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process of interrogating country’s human rights records, and other long term work by activists starting to bear fruit in other parts of the United Nations and other international bodies as well.