International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia
St George’s Parish Church Belfast 20 May 2012
4th Annual Church Service, organised by Changing Attitude Ireland
Address: Professor Michael O’Flaherty, Chief Commissioner N.I Human Rights Commission
It’s a great honour to be here today and I am very grateful to St Georges and to Changing Attitude Ireland for the invitation.
Let me begin with a personal reminiscence. About twelve years ago when I was living in Sierra Leone,a young woman came to my office.She described her efforts in establishing an LGBT movement in SierraLeone, she spoke of the corruption, discrimination, violence but also of her determination to see it through.
Soon after that meeting I left Sierra Leone. My visitor came back to my mind a few years laterwhen the leader of the Sierra Leone LGBT community, Fanny Ann Eddy went to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva and spoke of her experience and the experience of LGBT people in her country. In her presentation she highlighted the violence and oppression that lesbian and gay people face in many parts of Africa. She then went back home and soon after she was dead.
Her body was discovered in her office, she had been raped before she was killed.The homophobic nature of the murder was clear. Fanny Ann’s story puts a face for me on the worst form of atrocity that could happen in the context of discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Fanny Ann is one of those known, one of the known dead, we will probably never know how many other dead there are just because they were gay, because they were lesbian or were transgender.
There are still 77 countries today, well over a third of the countries of the earth, thatcriminalise homosexuality. Of those 77 there are 7 that retain the death penalty for being gay. Not all seven kill people, somedo.Deaths are just the worst of it.We also have to take account of the imprisonment, the torture, even the extra judicial killing, where someone taken out of the police cell and summarily executed. Beyond those types of atrocities there is also widespread discrimination in workplaces, school, in the home, across every dimension of human life. On top of all of that there is the deadening hand of impunity, of no accountability. In very many of these countries the perpetrators can get away with it just because the victim is gay or transgendered and nobody cares.
That is the reality we face globally as we mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. Of course it is also a day that it relevant for the LGBT community in Northern Ireland and thank goodness people here don’t get killed, they don’t get tortured on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, they don’t suffer the blatant total discrimination that I have just described, but there is by no means grounds for complacency on Northern Ireland. Some of the figures here are quite worrying.Only 0.9 percent of people in Northern Ireland are willing to disclosethat they are gay, lesbian or transgender. The general understanding is that this figure does not suggest that 0.9 percent of the people of Northern Ireland is gay, it suggests rather that a significant proportion of people who are gay in Northern Ireland are afraid to admit it, are afraid to share it with their community and with society. The extent of the fear in Northern Ireland is all the more thought provoking when we recall that the figure for London is 2.2 percent.
The Rainbow project has also released some startling figures in recent weeks. For example 30 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered people say they have been unfairly treated more than once in their lives because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. 87 percent of LGBT people surveyed say that schools make no effort to combat homophobic bullying. The statistics go on, all worrying, all disturbing. The picture in society is matched by gaps in law and policy in Northern Ireland. You are all familiar with issue of adoption and that the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is currently taking an action on that matter. One more policy problem at the moment is clearly around the issue of blood donation.
So what is to be done? In the first place I think it is necessary to answer the question of why do we need to do anything at all, why does it matter?
Searching for a way to present that to you, it occurred to me from a secular point to you that the answer comes very clearly from the most fundamental of all the human rights texts, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Some of you will know Article 1 of the Declaration which reads “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. Who are the people that the Universal Declaration talks about?Are they some kind of homogenized,standardized, conformist majoritarian group of people and on that basis we value them and give them their dignity and rights? Or are they instead people in all their richness, individualisms and in all their personal identity and is it that individualism, that indentity that is to be celebrated, to be marked in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? I suggest to you that this is exactly how we should understand the Universal Declaration.
All people should enjoy the fullness of their rights not in spite of but in the fullness of their sexual orientation or whatever their gender identity happens to be. I have been encouraged that this understanding of human rights is being increasingly reflected in international standards and in the way that they are being applied by the relevant human rights courts and bodies.
Eight weeks ago, and in testament to this view, the United Nations Secretary General, speaking to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva made a remarkable statement. Ban Ki Moon speaking to LGBT people said “Any attackon you is an attack on the Universal values of the United Nations”.
So then what can we do and what we must we do? In the first place we must be outraged.The situation of intolerance and attack across the world on the LGBT community is unacceptable and must not be condoned.There is no room for complacency.
Secondly, we must educate and inform. I have worked time and time again in countries across the world. If where,you help people understand the suffering caused to LGBT, human empathy is evoked and change becomes possible.
The next thing we should keep in mind, which is very much to the forefront of the work that I do and our Commission does, is to recall and never forget that what are we are demanding when we demand equality for LGBT people is no more and no less than what they are entitled to as a matter of law. When I say law, I am referring not necessarily to the domestic law that operates in the UK, but more broadly to the human rights treaties that the UK has freely accepted. We mustcontinue to remind our politicians and leaders that this is the case.
Finally, on a strictly practical point, I would like to see a specific reference toLGBT in the executives upcoming Cohesion Sharing and Integration Strategy.
I also urge every last one of us to remember our duty of solidarity with all the victims of LGBT related human rights violations across the world.
We must continue to express our solidarity including by marking IDAHO day and I can only hope that when we gather at IDAHO events next year somehow society will be a little bit more tolerant, a little bit more respectful. My hope and wish is that somehow we will have reached a situation in the world where the words of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will become a little bit less of an aspiration and a bit more of a reality.
ENDS