Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 17:55:16 -0800 From: "Nash Mir (Our World) Center" (by way of Ron Buckmire ) Subject: Our World Gay and Lesbian Centre gets state registration in Ukraine OUR WORLD GAY AND LESBIAN CENTRE GETS STATE REGISTRATION Nash Mir (Our World) Gay and Lesbian Centre has been registered as non-governmental organisation in Ukraine. The certificate No. 408 of November 30, 1999, was issued by the Department of Justice in Lugansk Region. The state registration of the first openly gay&lesbian organisation is an extremely important precedent for Ukraine. Main goals of the organisation mentioned in the Statute are: - assistance to defence of human rights and freedoms of homosexuals and improvement of their legal defence, fight against sexual orientation discrimination; - assistance to improvement of society's attitude towards homosexuality and homosexuals, reduction of homophobic sentiments in societal consciousness; - assistance to upbringing of gays' and lesbians' self-consciousness as equal and valuable members of society. Our World Centre was established on December 27, 1998, and has passed a long way for its recognition in the state. After illegal delays while examining the Centre's statute documents the Department of Justice in April of 1999 denied us state registration. The wording of denial called the reason for denial discrepancy of the Statute's provisions to Ukrainian law. Formally the denial did not touch gay issues. However other evidences and officials' statements particularly indicated that the authorities just did not want to recognise officially an organisation for defence of gay&lesbian rights. Of course we did not give up. Our question had been analysed by high-professional lawyers who did not find the reasoning of the Department satisfactory. Basing on these conclusions the founders of the Centre sued the Department of Justice. However virtually all lawyers knowing the reality of the current Ukrainian court system did not consider this variant as good enough. Courts indirectly but quite strongly depend on bodies of justice. Preliminary hearing of the case in a district court revealed that we had a very little chance to win the case. Along with the court examination our organisation draw attention of advanced world community to the appeared problem as a part of wider problems of non-observance of gays' and lesbians' equality in Ukrainian society. We are very grateful for great help that we obtained from: Amnesty International which carried out a campaign for support of Our World Centre. As far as we know the Ministry and the Department of Justice have received lots of letters from all the world which called to them to registrate our organisation; Ukrainian branch of Soros Foundation Network (Renaissance Foundation) which lobbied our question in the Ministry of Justice and render legal assistance to us; ILGA-Europe which promoted to draw attention of the Council of Europe to our problems. Unfortunately despite all our appeals we got virtually no support from Ukrainian human rights organisations. Only Ukrainian section of the International Society for Human Rights supported us in the country. Eventually the authorities have seen that it is impossible anymore to evade granting gays and lesbians the same rights, including the right of associations, which the other citizens have. Because of all these efforts of Our World Centre and its huge support, the authorities were compelled to recognise and registrate officially our organisation. Our experience clearly shows that there is a lot of work to do to achieve real equality for gays and lesbians in Ukrainian society. We thank all who supported us in our struggle and hope for your help and co-operation in the future. Our contact details are: Our World Gay and Lesbian Centre Postal address: PO Box 62, Lugansk 91051, UKRAINE Tel./fax: +380-642-479422 e-mail: ourworld@cci.lg.ua "Nash Mir" (Our World) magazine in Internet: http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/2118/