BEIRUT — In a joint letter, the Coalition to Defend Freedom of Expression in Lebanon denounced Monday the crackdown on peaceful gatherings and events of the LGBTQ+ community that promote the community’s rights, as well as the heightened hate speech toward the community.
Here’s what we know:
• The coalition comprises more than 10 rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Legal Agenda, The Lebanese Center for Human Rights and Helem, which is a non-governmental organization defending queer rights in Lebanon.
• The Interior Ministry's decision to crack down on LGBTQ gatherings “alarmingly indicates the deterioration of human rights and freedoms in Lebanon,” said Helem’s executive director,Tarek Zeidan, in the letter. “The ban tells LGBTI people that the government is willing to throw away their fundamental rights if others want them to.”
• Lebanon's caretaker Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi sent a letter on June 24 to the General Directorate of General Security and the General Directorate of the Internal Security Forces (ISF), calling on security forces to prevent gatherings that "promote homosexuality."
• Rights groups added that the ban violates the LGBTQ community’s “constitutional rights to equality, free expression, and free assembly and Lebanon’s obligations under international law.”
• The letter also noted that officers from General Security, Internal Security, and the Internal Security’s information branch interrogated activists at a cultural center “about a planned private seven-person workshop, telling them to cancel the event or apply for a permit.”
• It added that activists have been reporting on recurring calls from the Internal Security Forces’ information branch inviting them “for a chat over coffee,” and cautioning them that “they were monitoring the activists’ social media accounts.” The activists have declined the ISF’s invitations, the letter said.
• The letter highlighted the fact that the security forces’ justification for suppressing the community’s gatherings because the organizers “failed to obtain prior approval from the authorities” does not stand because the 1911 Lebanese Law on Public Meetings, which the security forces are citing, “only applies to public meetings.”
• “The security forces’ reasoning contravenes international guidance on freedom of assembly under human rights law, which excludes notification requirements where the impact of the gathering can be expected to be minimal, which would be the case for a small workshop held in private,” the coalition wrote.