Posted by:
Claude J. Summers on 03/23/12
Last updated on:
03/23/12
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
The international gay rights organization AllOut.org has released a new video calling attention to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's historic March 7, 2012 speech on gay rights and to the walk-out staged by some UN representatives to protest it.
Ban Ki-moon, who became Secretary-General of the United Nations in 2007 and who was recently elected to a second five-year term, has emerged as a proponent of equal rights for glbtq people. He has eagerly signed on to the position recently articulated in the UN Human Rights Council by
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
that gay rights are human rights.
On March 7, in an historic speech delivered at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Ban Ki-moon implored countries around the world to decriminalize same-sex relationships and end discrimination against glbtq people.
Overshadowing the speech itself was the reaction of some UN representatives. In a breach of protocol, several members of the council staged an obviously pre-arranged boycott of the speech, walking out of the hall as the Secretary General began to speak.
The boycott of the Secretary General's speech at least had the virtue of calling attention to the fact that in many areas of the world gay people live in varying degrees of danger and terror. Seventy-six countries criminalize homosexual acts, with 10 of them prescribing punishments of death or life imprisonment.
In response to the insulting move by the representatives who walked out on the Secretary General's historic speech, the international activist organization
AllOut.org
has issued a video in which they re-mix the inspiring speech in order to "remind us that in many places around the world LGBT people are still demonized, criminalized, attacked and even killed for who they are."