Why should being gay be a crime?

On November 17 the Paris-based International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) will launch a global campaign for a United Nations resolution declaring that homosexuality should no longer be considered a crime anywhere in the world.

The proposed U.N. resolution is the brainchild of IDAHO’s founder, Louis-Georges Tin, 32, a professor and author of a number of books (including the Dictionary of Homophobia) who is also a rising star of France’s emerging black movement for equality.

Tin will simultaneously release a list of hundreds of VIP endorsers of the proposed U.N. resolution, including a gaggle of Nobel Prize winners (among them, Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Dario Fo of Italy, Elfriede Jelinek of Austria, and Amartya Sen of India); political leaders, including two former French prime ministers (Laurent Fabius and Michel Rocard); academics (such as Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman and world-famous sociologist Richard Sennett); entertainers (such as Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep, David Bowie, Edward Norton, Mike Nichols, Lily Tomlin, actor-playwright Wallace Shawn, humorist Bruce Vilanch, and Spanish actress Victoria Abril); and a host of renowned writers, including Doug Wright, Jon Robin Baitz, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, Sir Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Russell Banks, Bernard-Henri Levy, John Berendt,
Lady Antonia Fraser, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Chambon, Peter Carey, and Edmund White.

Getting the U.N. to commit to universal decriminalization of homosexuality is destined to become the central objective of the international LGBT movement for the next decade. Tin spoke to TheAdvocate.

What chance do you think this resolution has of passing the U.N.?
Many people believe such a resolution is beyond reach. I personally don't. Why? Because there is already U.N. jurisprudence in our favor. In 1994, Mr. Toonen, a citizen of Tasmania, who had been condemned for same-sex relationships, won his case in what was then the U.N. Commission on Human Rights—it said his arrest was a breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the right of privacy. So we just ask the U.N. to extend this jurisprudence to other countries—75 in the world!—where same-sex relationships are still forbidden. There’s recent evidence that this is not as utopian a project as it might seem at first glance: In October this year, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared that the imprisonment in Cameroon of 11 men who’d been caught in a raid on a gay bar on charges of homosexuality was "an arbitrary deprivation of liberty" that violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. That’s encouraging.

How will you and IDAHO work for its passage?
The campaign for the U.N. resolution will have two main components. An external media campaign to raise awareness within public opinion and governments will begin with the November 17 unveiling of a petition—for which VIP signatures are now being gathered—on IDAHO’s Web site, www.idahomophobia.org. Also, a host of international and country organizations have already signed on as cosponsors of the campaign for the resolution, like the International Lesbian and Gay Association and France‘s Ligue des Droits de l‘Homme. The second battle has to be waged within the new U.N. Council on Human Rights. We have to lobby the states that are members and ask them to support the resolution or at least not to vote against it. We are talking with the government of South Africa, which is a member of the council to sponsor the resolution. South Africa was the first country in the world to include the principle of nondiscrimination against gays and lesbians in its constitution—and their sponsorship would show that LGBT rights are not just a "Western issue."

What exactly does the resolution say?

The text I wrote asks for a universal decriminalization of homosexuality. It is very clear, easy, and simple, and based solely on the articles of the U.N.‘s Universal Declaration of Human Rights that were used to justify the decision in the Toonen case. I did not want to write a philosophical text on the issue, because an argument that may be relevant in one country will certainly be irrelevant in another one. We need a common language to support human rights. What could be more relevant and more international than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself?

Why did you choose this moment to launch this campaign?
The Toonen case was ruled on 12 years ago, so I thought it was high time that LGBT organizations decided to take advantage of it at the U.N. To be honest, I fail to see any issue that could be more important than this one for LGBT organizations. On May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization
decided that homosexuality could no longer be regarded as a disease, which is why I chose that date for the International Day Against Homophobia. The first IDAHO was only celebrated in 2005, so we really couldn’t do anything before that—but now our organization has spread to more than 50 countries and been endorsed by the European Parliament, so I think we are ready to go farther. Look, gays and lesbians around the world cannot wait any longer for their love to cease being made a crime. Many are in jail, or at risk of being jailed. Some are being killed. This has to stop now.