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Inter Parliamentary Union Votes to Ban LGBT Debate

Today the 138th Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Assembly voted. with 689 MPs against and 499 legislators voted for, the proposal to debate an amendment on the rights of LGBT refugees and migrants. Melanie Nathan, Executive Director of the African Human Rights Coalition, notes:

This push to negate LGBT people was led by the notoriously homophobic leader of the Ugandan parliament, Rebecca Kadaga.It is a sad day when so many people who seek refuge from criminalization and persecution from their own countries receive further abuse at the hands of a global body such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union. This is a body which ought to place human rights and protections for these very people at the fore. It is as if these criminalizing and persecutory nations are trying to contain and control the only protections available to persecuted LGBT people, which obviously involves global protections in the form of exile and migration. This may well lead to a split in the organization, as it becomes a reality for states which protect all people equally to realize that it is not possible to continue to function in a climate so contrary to basic human decency – to turn against the most marginalized of refugees and asylum seekers, who have a right to protections from other nations.

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