Haratin: Germany Denies Entry to Mauritanian LGBT Activist
Photo courtesy of Erasing 76 Crimes
An LGBT activist and founder of Mauritania’s only LGBT rights group has been denied a visitor’s visa to Germany. He applied for a German visa in order to attend a workshop on security and activism as he continues in his efforts to curtail violence against members of the LGBT community in Mauritania, who are consistently persecuted by the government. Germany regularly denies entry to West African nationals who have been invited to activism trainings by LGBT advocacy group Hamiam.
The article below was published by Erasing 76 Crimes:
German embassies have repeatedly stymied the LGBT support group Hamiam when it invites LGBT activists for training in Cologne, Germany. One of the latest activists to be blocked is the founder of Mauritania’s lone LGBT advocacy group.
Lamine, the founder and leader of the Nouakchott Solidarity Association, was invited to Hamiam’s week-long January workshop on security for activists. But when he approached the German embassy for a visa, it was denied.
Embassy staff told him that, if he reached Germany, they feared that he would not return to Mauritania. He insists that he will.
If he is ever granted a visa, Lamine will pay the cost of medical insurance and round-trip air travel to Cologne (a total of about US $950, or 300,000 Mauritanian ouguiya). Hamiam will pay the expenses incurred in Cologne. Hamiam schedules its workshops in January and June of each year.
Lamine described himself as an attorney — the first LGBT activist lawyer in Mauritania — who founded the organization in February 2015 in Nouakchott, Mauritania’s capital and largest city, in order to work to end discrimination and violence against LGBT Mauritanians.
“We are trying sensitize the population about tolerance. We ask them to consider LGBT people simply as human beings like themselves,” he said.
The Islamic Republic of Mauritania does not recognize the human rights of LGBT people, Lamine said.
“It’s a purely racist government. They are all white and Arabic-speaking. They don’t consider us to be human,” Lamine said. “LGBT people are arrested, put in prison and sometimes killed.”
LGBT Mauritanians live in fear, he said. “It’s a hard, dangerous life.”
The Mauritanian government has rejected a request to grant official recognition to the Nouakchott Solidarity Association, Lamine said.
Hamiam, which stands for Help a Minority in a Minority, invites a group of LGBTI activists twice a year for training sessions that largely focus on security. In January, the invitations went to three activists in Uganda, Ghana and Mauritania, all of whom were denied visas.
The same denials have often occurred in the past, but a few activists eventually received visas after writing protest letters.
In 2015, Hamiam said, three activists received visas — two from Uganda and one from Burkina Faso. More than 30 LGBTI activists were invited to the June seminar, but 27 of them were unable to attend. None of the invitees from Cameroon or Senegal could get visas. Of four Ugandan activists interviewed at the German embassy in Kampala, only two received visas. In 2016, one Ugandan activist received a visa for the January seminar and a Kenyan activist received one for the June seminar.
Hamiam stated that it has sometimes fought the denials in court, but that process is too costly to continue.
Hamiam faced a similar problem in after working on “Am Rande der Gesellschaft” (“At the Edge of Society”), a 2014 documentary about the violence suffered by LGBTI Africans in Germany and in Ghana. In December 2016, several Ghanaians, including the director of the Ghana portion, were denied visas to attend the premiere in Germany, Hamiam said.
