Nepal Gay Rights Group Fights Possible Ban

BYLINE: KEDAR MAN SINGH

A group championing the rights of homosexuals in conservative Nepal is frantically seeking international support to help it stave off a possible judicial ban, its president told AFP.

"We started campaigning through the Internet and (by telephone) with sexual rights groups in other countries, including Thailand, India, Singapore and China," said Sunil Babu Pant, president of Nepal's Blue Diamond Society (BDS).

"We are also campaigning in association with European Union parliamentarians, Dutch diplomats as well as organisations for sexual minorities in the Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa to protect our rights," he said in an interview.

On July 8, a lawyer petitioned Nepal's Supreme Court to shut down the BDS, a non governmental organisation working in areas of sexual health and human rights.

The court gave the Nepalese government until July 27 to show why the BDS should not be be banned.

While there is no legal provision that explicitly criminalises homosexual conduct, Nepal's civil code punishes any kind of "unnatural sex" with up to one year in prison.

The provision has been used to justify arrests of homosexual men and the transgendered, Pant said.

Until now the government has not targetted any sexual rights groups and legal experts said it may challenge the court order on legal grounds, taking into account the implications internationally of allowing a rights group to be outlawed in the kingdom.

A home ministry official said Monday the government has the option to reply to the supreme court notice within 35 days from July 27.

"We will study the case seriously before sending the reply," said the official, who asked not to be named.

Pant estimated that some 1,000 gays and lesbians have joined BDS, which with financial support from the US Agency for International Development is engaged in programmes to educate people across Nepal about HIV/AIDS.

Recently, he said some male and female gays declared themselves married couples.

"But the families of the girls reacted violently and used force to separate them and then married them off to men," Pant said.

Police, he claimed, committed atrocities against members of sexual minorities and had sexually abused some of them.

However, police denied the allegations, saying they merely rounded up teenage boys who dressed up like women and loitered on street corners.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch has called on Kathmandu to affirm "the freedoms of association and _expression".

"In trying to stifle the voices of sexual minorities, Nepal demonstrates its indifference to basic rights of _expression and assembly," said Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Programme at Human Rights Watch, in a letter to Nepal's authorities.