What is the crime of gender-motivated persecution??
It is a crime against humanity (that is to say, of those that exist within the Rome Statute, which is an international agreement between States that believe that there should be an international authority that punishes criminals who cannot be tried or do not want to be tried in their own countries). It focuses on punishing the series of crimes that seek to affect the fundamental rights of a person or a group of people for sharing some characteristic essential to their identity.: the religion, The ethnic group, or gender.
This crime punishes persecutory acts and, also, discriminatory intent. So, unjust is encompassed by both the crimes and the discriminatory ideas that the perpetrator used as fuel for his actions. The gender, In this stage, refers to socially accepted notions as constructions of this category. In Colombia—and in most of the world—gender is a binary division of human bodies (man and woman) with behaviors specifically allowed or prohibited for each of the two groups. One of the essential behaviors for both genders is to be heterosexual and cisgender. For that reason, Acts of violence that are motivated by the idea that LGBTQ people are “bad women” or “bad men” can be prosecuted through this crime against humanity..
Colombia Diversa has published several books in which it explains and offers more examples about this crime committed in Colombia.: Who is going to tell us?, The orders of prejudice, someone is looking for you. We also have a website where we have collected several stories of LGBTQ people who have suffered and resisted this persecution.: A journey of Peace
What precedents exist for this crime??
None! There are no decisions from any judge on the crime against humanity of gender-motivated persecution. This is due to the incorrect idea that gender-based discrimination has no relation to the wars that humans wage against each other.. The reality is that gender discrimination is at the heart of the war: who cooks, who handles weapons, who can decide about your body, who “raise” the soldiers, who decides how many children to have. These are all ideas that constitute war and the society that must endure it. (and survive it). In the decision of September 2023 of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace of Colombia this changed. In that decision, responsibility for the crime of gender-motivated persecution against LGBTQ people is assigned to 13 top officials of the FARC-EP guerrilla.
Why is it important for society that this is happening??
Because a long time ago we owed ourselves a serious conversation about the role that gender and sexuality occupy in our lives.. Because it seems that everything is determined for those who love and are (that is to say: ¡death!). We need to think about how fixed ideas about “being a man” and “being a woman” hurt us.. We need to recognize that even wars feed and take advantage of these ideas.. What we need is a society and a world that allows us to be happy, that allows us to live a life free of humiliation, and that allows us to find happiness at our own pace without fear of being attacked or eliminated by those who do not live love and the world as we do..
