Petition to the Honourable Members of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States

Speech entitled “Human Rights, HIV/AIDS and Discrimination in the Americas on the Occasion of the Exhibit of the AIDS Quilt at OAS Grounds in the Context of the World AIDS Conference”. [...] By criminalising a wide array of consensual sexual conduct between persons of the legal age of consent established elsewhere in the SOA, these provisions violate the fundamental rights of all sexually active (or potentially active) people in Barbados, such as the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression. [...] Barbados ratified the Convention in 1981 and has accepted the jurisdiction of both the Commission and the Court to consider the Petitioners’ claim that their rights under the Convention have been, and are being, breached by Barbadian law. [...] The Petitioners assert that sections 9 and 12 of the SOA both violate, and encourage violations of, the following rights of the Petitioners and of other LGBT people in Barbados, in breach of multiple provisions of the Convention: • the rights to non-discrimination in enjoyment of Convention rights (Article 1) and to equality before the law and equal protection of the law (Article 24); • the right [...] In so doing, Barbados not only breaches its obligations under the Convention, but is increasingly out of step with modern practice of the majority of the countries in the Americas and in the world: at last count, 124 states have either repealed laws which prohibit consensual sexual conduct between persons of the same sex or had no such laws to begin with.6 The Petitioners accordingly ask the Commi