The Benetech Human Rights Program celebrates the success of the Uganda Consortium of our partner organizations in producing a new, high-quality report on persecution and discrimination against Uganda’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex (LGBTI) community. Released on July 23 in Kampala, the 2015 Report on Violations Based on Sex Determination, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation […]
The Benetech Human Rights team has recently returned from Johannesburg, where we convened multiple Southern African partner organizations in the LGBTI community whom we have been supporting in establishing human rights documentation initiatives. We were very excited to organize this event, as it is the culmination of a four-year, collective effort to build a culture of systematic, evidence-based documentation of human rights violations against LGBTI individuals in Southern Africa.
The African region has seen rising levels of homophobia over the last several months. Amidst the changing climate of restrictive, “anti-gay” laws that have swept the region, local LGBTI activists are facing new types of risks and threats, yet digital security literacy among LGBTI activists in the region remains quite low. That’s why a joint team from our Human Rights Program and from Access organized a workshop and a digital security health clinic focused on improving digital security for LGBTI activists in the African region. In a joint blog post published on the Access blog, they report from the field.
I had the chance to sit down with Ugandan LGBTI activist Richard Lusimbo earlier this month at RightsCon. At the conference, he represented the LGBTI community in Uganda, where he says he feels like a criminal since the signing of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in February. I spoke to him about a range of issues, including LGBTI Rights and digital security.
I recently returned from a weeklong training in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I worked with our partner, Housing Works, to set up a nation-wide human rights documentation project using Martus, Benetech’s secure, open source documentation tool. The new initiative follows on the heels of a spate of homophobic violence experienced by the Haitian LGBTI community earlier this year. By the end of our training week, we graduated 20 new Martus Human Rights monitors representing 10 organizations working across the country with the goal of ensuring that no human rights violation motivated by homophobia, misogyny or stigma based on HIV status goes undocumented.
