Equality Philippines

I just realized, based on my experience last month, that I am an overly-scheduled person. On top of work, I am also working on my Master's thesis at the University of the Philippines, attending Spanish classes every Saturday, running three times a week and going to the gym for the same number of days. Add to these doing advocacy work for the LGBT community. My life will probably look more hectic compared to the average person. No matter, I like it this way. I enjoy being busy and I hate being idle although I do feel sometimes that there are just too many things to do in so little time. Last month alone I was in several activities involving the LGBT community. First I was a speaker at the Alternative Classroom Learning Experience (ACLE) forum on coming out (see pic above) of the University of the Philippines (UP) Babaylan, an LGBT students rights advocacy group in the UP system. I shared my coming out experience with the mainly student audience. I told them that in the past because ...

The High Court in Delhi ruled that the Indian penal code outlawing consensual sex between homosexual adults violates the right to life, privacy and dignity in the Indian Constitution. The Court cited the Yogyakarta Principles. The High Court in Delhi ruled that the Indian penal code outlawing consensual sex between homosexual adults violates the right to life, privacy and dignity in the Indian Constitution. The Court cited the Yogyakarta Principles. If you would like to read the historic 105 page judgment, it is available at the Times of India website . In addition to Indian case law, the Court's judgment cited numerous international treaties and other instruments as well as case law from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Nepal. The Yogyakarta principals were referred to as follows: Paragraph 43 (citation omitted): On 26th March, 2007, a group of human rights experts launched the Yogyakarta Principles on the A...

Below is the call for writer and translator of the Yogyakarta Principles (YyP) Project of Ang Ladlad , the national organization of LGBT Filipinos. One of Ang Ladlad's campaigns for the year is to popularize the Yogyakarta Principles , an international document that applies human rights standards to issues pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. After launching the YyP in the 2008 Manila Pride March and releasing a primer which I wrote and my friend Sass laid-out, now Ang Ladlad plans to translate the YyP into Filipino to make it more accessible to more people who want to know about LGBT human rights. The YyP translation is envisioned to contain cases of LGBT discrimination to demonstrate the 28 principles of the YyP. This is going to be an important document in LGBT civil rights advocacy in the Philippines and if you are or anyone you know is interested to be a part of it, please read the call below and submit the requirements to the email address spe...