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UNIBAM Broadening The Discussion
Mon, April 24, 2017
Today, at the Princess Ramada Hotel, UNIBAM, the gay rights activist group, and the National AIDS Commission completed the first day of a 2-day conference on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.

Since last year, August, when UNIBAM's Caleb Orozco got that landmark victory at the Supreme Court, the controversy over the lifestyle of the local gay community hasn't been making much news. But, UNIBAM insists that injustices against gay people continue every day.

This morning, the executive director of UNIBAM told us that the social exclusion and unfair treatment that gay persons in Belize experience is not only reserved for them. He pointed out that systemic marginalization can affect other groups such as the poor. Here's how he explained it:

Caleb Orozco, Executive Director - UNIBAM
"One of the things we come to learn during our work in the last 10 years is that there is something called systemic marginalization, that not only impact person's sexual orientation and sexual identity, but it impacts young people in education, it impacts young girls as well. It also impacts every other groups that considers themselves marginalized or on the fringe of society."

"We've seen when citizens are concern about an issue, they litigate. Whether it was the Mayan land rights, whether it's Maria Roches, whether it's the Supreme Court versus Pallotti, whether it's the recent judicial review of Imhotep Diego versus Jermaine Cayetano. All these things show that citizens hold accountable perpetrators of rights violation and the only recourse they have is to litigate it our courts. For which that very potent, because when citizens remain silence or decide that they won't file a violation, its means the violation is perpetrated and it means that that silence perpetuate a status quo of mistreatment."

"When we are looking at socio perspective, we are looking at the inequity or the unequal treatment of person based on sexual orientation and gender identity in law. We are looking at the unequal treatment of persons in education. We are looking at the unequal treatment of persons in employment. We are looking at the same issue in health, in regards to violence within the criminal code system. We are looking at the unequal treatment of persons and this affects their families. We are all vulnerable to systemic marginalization, because when you are poor, you are not only unseen, you are unheard and you are treated as if you are a burden to the system, but in a system which is indifferent to the file - that we have no safety net and so the work today is about raising the knowledge of systemic marginalization from a socio perspective, but to also get people to connect to the idea of how vulnerable we all are to not only legislative oppression, but marginalization as citizens."

The conference titled, International Law and Development: A SOGI Perspective & Belize's Domestic: Law: A Human Right's Perspective, continues tomorrow.

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