Rainbow of Macau hustling for local LGBT rights at the UN Human Rights Committee
Rainbow of Macau, a local LGBT rights non-governmental organisation, has submitted a report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee to concur equal protection to victims of domestic violence without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Macau.
The report will be supplemented with the LGBT+ Survey to raise this issue at its 129th session scheduled for June 29 to July 24 of this year.
According to MacauBusiness, the report will focus on the following 3 main issues:
Equality and non-discrimination
Recognition of transgender persons’ gender marker
Domestic violence
Rainbow of Macau said there have invoked “lack of social consensus” when it comes to equal rights related to the LGBT community.
Stated in the report:
“Rainbow of Macau observes that a so-called ‘lack of social consensus’ is no more than an excuse for the state party to evade the responsibilities of rectifying discriminatory laws,”
Back in 2015, the group wrote to the Committee against Torture (CAT) regarding to the lack of protection given to the same-sex intimate partners under the Domestic Violence Law.
Although CAT urged Macau to enact the law without discrimination, the government of Macau had refused to reinstate the reference to same-sex partners in the final text of the Domestic Violence Law.
The 2019 Macau LGBT+ Survey was conducted online in October last year, with 994 valid responses. It concluded that the community had experienced a “high level of discrimination.” With the following figures:
14% of LGB people in Macau have considered committing suicide in connection to their gender identity
44.2% claimed to have faced pressure due to their family's expectation for marriage
40% seeing active opposition by their family over their sexual orientation
27% indicated to have been the target of discrimination
27.6% suffered from verbal assaults due to their sexual orientation
3% reported violent acts committed against them