Regional Urgency Required
Book review by Sokari Ekine
Urgency is required at this very moment as the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 is pending before the Ugandan Parliament. Same-sex relationships are already illegal in the country, with sentences running from five years to life imprisonment. The laws, which are based on the British colonial penal code, do not specifically refer to relationships between women, but lesbians are stigmatized and face similar aggression and malice from society and the state as gay men. the proposed Anti-Homose...
Review by Sonia Corrêa
A coletânea Urgency required: Gay and lesbian rights are human rights, editada por Ireen Dubel e André Hielkema foi lançada no começo de 2010 (e está disponível em http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/News/Urgency-Required-Out-Now). Seu conteúdo traduz para o inglês a publicação holandesa Urgentie Geboden, de 2008, que também veio a público nos números 33/34 do Journal of Humanistics. A coletânea é composta de 47 artigos distribuídos em seis seções: 1. A Holanda ontem e hoje; 2. Co...
‘Equality is a Moral Imperative’ - Martha McDevitt-Pugh
The election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States on 4 November 2008 was an exhilarating moment for many in the LGBTI movement in the US and worldwide. Obama’s election puts an end to the Bush era - eight years which saw a sea of change for LGBT rights in many places around the globe as well as at a local and state level in the US. While much of the world moved forward, the US government actions seemed more consistent with the 1950s than with the 21st century. Just how b...Self-portrait - Radenka Grubacic
When I was thirteen years old, I felt attracted to a kindergarten female teacher. I was surprised and overwhelmed at the same time. At first I thought about it as something perfectly normal, because love is normal. I told my sister and a friend about it, but I was ridiculed and was not taken very seriously. When I was sixteen, I finally came out to myself as a lesbian. I was fully aware of my identity and I embraced it. But at the same time, I kept it a secret, because I knew how homosexuali...The Tyranny of the Majority. Gays in Poland - Wendelmoet Boersema
Prominent Polish gays are pursuing a new solidarity struggle. They call themselves ‘love dissidents’ fighting for a tolerant climate. Poles have become more nationalistic and they make life difficult for gays. ‘When I was an adolescent in the Poland of the eighties, homosexuality was a regular topic of conversation during sex education classes. If I had been young in today’s Poland, I would have felt as if I was judged and that I immediatelyhad to take a political point of view.’EU Support for LGBT People in Neighbouring Countries - Maxim Anmeghichean and Aija Salo
The European Union offers a range of mechanisms to monitor and promote human rights, as do other European and international institutions. With the adoption of the Amsterdam Treaty, the European Union acquis (1) explicitly included a commitment to equality and non-discrimination based on sexual orientation. Equality irrespective of gender identity and gender expression is covered in the legal framework of EU through the Gender EqualityDirective.‘The Greenwood’ in Maurice and Brokeback Mountain - André Hielkema
Maurice (1987) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) have been two very successful films of the last twenty years (1) bringing developments in the struggle of the gay liberation movement in the West to the forefront in a remarkable way. Both are named after the literary works on which they are based: Maurice by E.M. Forster (1879-1970) which was written in 1913- 1914 and published in 1971 and the novella Brokeback Mountain (published as a story in 1997 in The New Yorker) by Annie Proulx (born in 193...United by Love, Exiled by Law - Martha McDevitt- Pugh
Martha McDevitt-Pugh is a love exile, a term she coined herself when she realized that there was nothing free about her choice to live with her partner Lin in the Netherlands. At age 40, she fell in love with a friend she had met seventeen years earlier. The couple negotiated an agreement to live together in the Netherlands for two years, until Lin’s son had finished high school. Martha left a flourishing career in Silicon Valley, expecting to return. Only once she left did Martha discover t...LGBT Rights in the Workplace - Peter Purton
It is now more than thirty years since the first openly lesbian and gay trade unionists began to win support from their trade unions against discrimination in British workplaces. It is more than twenty years since the British trade union movement - in a debate at the 1985 Trades Union Congress - agreed as national policy to combat such discrimination. And it is ten years since that policy was given more concrete form, when official representative structures were established within the body o...The Yogyakarta Principles - Boris Dittrich
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked the girl. We were hiding behind a car in front of the Tverskaya police station on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street in Moscow. From the other side of the street a group of skinheads and other anti-gay nationalists were throwing eggs at us. Most of the eggs hit the wall of the police station but one landed between the girl’s neck and shoulders. The yolkleft a blurry, yellow mess.Region Other themes on Urgency Required
Civic Driven change:Bringing Politics back in
Politics is central to development discourse, yet remains peripheral. And, over some twenty years, a civil society narrative has not fulfilled its potential to ‘bring politics back in’. Reasons can be found in conceptual confusion, in selectivity in donor thinking and policies towards civil society and in the growth-driven political economy of NGO-ism.
Pluralism, Civil Society and Subaltern Counterpublics
This new Pluralism Working Paper reflects on the concerns of pluralism in India, from the vantage point of the ‘new’ subaltern counterpublics. It presents a case for civil society organizations (CSOs) that might facilitate a reconsideration of their conceptual frames and strategies for intervention in the light of recent developments.
Regional Perspectives on the ‘Dignity Revolutions
This policy paper provides unique perspectives from Middle Eastern activists who are part of popular protests across the region. The recommendations are based on their perspectives and addressed to the EU at large European Commission, the Dutch government and Non-Governmental Organisations in order for them to best support the democratic transitions in the region.These perspectives were the subject of lively and inspiring debates at...
Small, competitive and resilient - How small-scale producers contribute to food security
Food insecurity threatens almost one billion people, especially in rural areas in developing countries, where four out of five people go hungry every day. Scientists estimate that the world’s population will grow to 9.1 billion by 2050. Since natural resources are already dangerously degraded, fossil fuels are becoming scarce, and climate change has become an impending reality, this poses a serious challenge. To nourish the growing population and meet the challenges of climate change, it is n...
Exporting Censorship and Surveillance Technology
Western companies turn a healthy profit by exporting their surveillance technologies and equipment to repressive regimes. This is what Ben Wagner concludes in the Hivos-commissioned report “Exporting Censorship and Surveillance Technology”.Wagner interviewed dozens of people from Europe and North Africa and found that governments there have relied heavily on Western censorship technologies in an attempt to quell the civil unrest during the Arab Spring. Earlier reports had already established...
It's the Future Calling
What do you do when the phone rings? You pick up, or let people leave a message on your voicemail and check it soon after. The phone has been ringing for a long time now in the development sector.What do you do when a caller starts conversing? You talk back - if only to say you're going to hang up. We talk a lot in the sector.What do you do when the caller starts shouting? You hang up, even if the other person has a valid reason to shout. In the development sector, we don’t like shouters. We...