Two gay activists in Belarus filed a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Secretariat in Geneva June 20, charging that Belarusian authorities breached their right to freedom of assembly last December.
Sergey Androsenko, chief organizer of Minsk Gay Pride, and Sergey Praded, editor of the Belarusian magazine “Gay: Good As You,” were arrested Dec. 16 while picketing the Iranian Embassy in Minsk to protest Iran’s treatment of gay people.
They were fined, the fine was upheld by an appeals court, and the Supreme Court refused to hear a further appeal.
“We know that the (UN) decision we will get is not binding, but we know that a decision in our favor would be disturbing for the Belarusian government — and in any case we do not have any other option,” Androsenko said.
Belarus is not a member of the Council of Europe, so the activists cannot appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which is where other cases have ended up when gays’ legal rights have been trampled in Eastern Europe.
Iran punishes gay sex with the death penalty, although in nearly all the cases that have been publicized, the teens and men who were hanged were accused of additional crimes as well, such as homosexual rape.
In 2008, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied that people are executed solely for having gay sex.
“Homosexuals are not even known who they are to be hanged,” he told the Democracy Now! radio program. “So, we don’t have executions of homosexuals. Of course, we consider it an abhorrent act, but it is not punished through capital punishment.”
A year earlier, speaking in New York City, Ahmadinejad had claimed that “we in Iran don’t have homo-play (hamjensbaz) like you have in your country.”
“In our country … absolutely such a thing does not exist as a phenomenon,” he said. “I don’t know who told you otherwise.”
Six other nations have the death penalty for gay sex — Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and, in some regions, Nigeria and Somalia.
By Rex Wockner
