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Building pathways to safety during COVID-19

Understanding how COVID-19 is affecting the populations we serve has been the first step in our response to the pandemic. To that end, we have published a report called “The Impact of COVID-19 on Displaced LGBTQI Persons.” Drawing on research work from our partner organizations and interviews with human rights defenders around the world, this report includes four recommendations to policymakers.


Building pathways to safety during COVID-19 Building pathways to safety during COVID-19

The Issue

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
Countries around the world started adopting sweeping measures, including full lockdowns, travel restrictions and temporarily sealing borders to contain the virus. This made our work more complicated than ever.

We know that those who are most marginalized have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, including members of LGBTQI+ communities. COVID-19 continues to threaten health-care systems in many countries that criminalize same-sex intimacy. Unfortunately, we also know that leaders have been using the pandemic to target the LGBTQI+ community in some countries. We have already seen it in Uganda: under the guise of lockdown restrictions, authorities raided an LGBTQI+ shelter and arrested 23 people on March 29, 2020. We know for certain they were arrested under false pretenses, and that they are still being detained.

Our Response

Understanding how COVID-19 is affecting the populations we serve has been the first step in our response to the pandemic. To that end, we have published a report called “The Impact of COVID-19 on Displaced LGBTQI Persons.” Drawing on research work from our partner organizations and interviews with human rights defenders around the world, this report includes four recommendations to policymakers.

We have conducted a review of our programmatic offerings to assess the challenges presented by the pandemic. Helping individuals find a pathway to safety by relocating them remains our primary objective. We continue to build a suite of complementary methods to ensure people can remain safe, even if we can’t immediately move them out of danger.

We continue to stand in solidarity with and advocate for internally displaced persons, people awaiting resettlement and asylum seekers who have been affected by tightening border restrictions as a result of COVID-19. We are calling on governments everywhere to uphold Article 14 of the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to seek asylum. We stand in solidarity with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee’s (UNHCR) statement that COVID-19 should not close avenues to asylum.

In October 2020, we published a snapshot of our impact during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our strategic plan has been essential in guiding our response to this crisis. Some of the key changes include expanding organizational referrals, providing greater access to information, providing individualized support and emergency in-country relocation.