Nepal: New Prime Minister Must Keep Promise To LGBTI Community
Last week marked the coming out party for one of the world’s newest heads of state. Baburam Bhattarai, the newly-elected Prime Minister of Nepal, visited New York and Washington, D.C. to meet and greet world leaders, and introduce himself to the United Nations.
Bhattarai has had a lot on his plate since taking office, so leaving the country was a questionable move in the first place. The deadline for Nepal’s new constitution, just two months away, looms on the horizon, and the Constituent Assembly — the 600-some strong body charged with delivering the draft of a new constitution for the Himalayan nation — has been mired in deadlock for nearly a year. In addition, Bhattarai makes this trip on the heels of his first bold proclamation that has human rights groups reeling: he wants blanket amnesty for all crimes committed during the ten-year internal armed conflict that wracked Nepal until 2006. (Bhattarai’s party, the Maoist Party, emerged out of the Maoist rebel group that started the “People’s Revolution,†in which over 10,000 people died.)
But while concerns over transitional justice issues will no doubt be on the agendas of many world leaders as they meet Bhattarai in the U.S., another troubling human rights issue lurks, waiting now four years for proper implementation. To put it simply: Nepal should have some of the most gay- and trans-friendly laws in the world, but it doesn’t. Bhattarai holds the keys to making this happen.
In 2007, Nepal’s leading LGBTI rights activist, Sunil Babu Pant, won a Supreme Court Case demanding full, fundamental equality for all sexual and gender minority citizens. It was a landmark, comprehensive decision. The world watched as Nepal, a traditional and conservative society by many measures, emerged onto the global LGBT rights stage as an example of effective activism and advocacy for sexual and gender minorities.
Bhattarai’s power to implement these laws is crucial. Government bureaucracy in Nepal is thick and chaotic; ministries change personnel so frequently that lobbying them can seem pointless. Since the 2007 Supreme Court decision, for example, four people have served as Home Minister. The Home Ministry is responsible for, among other things, issuing citizenship identification cards, without which many basic services are out of reach for Nepali people.
The Court decision mandated that the government issue ID cards that allow citizens to identify as third gender (the term used in Nepal for transgender or binary gender non-conforming people.) To date, only a handful of people have successfully done this, and all succeeded by putting up a hearty fight.
Nepal
A simple directive letter from Prime Minister Bhattarai could change this for the entire country. Just before the Parliament voted on a new PM, Bhattarai promised to do this while seeking support from CPN (United), a party with five votes in the Parliament, one of which belonged to Pant, who has been a Member of Parliament since 2008. Advocates and activists were encouraged by Bhattarai’s promise.
In fact, Bhattarai, when he was Finance Minister in 2008 under the first Maoist regime, did something no other government of Nepal had ever done: he created a budget line for programs geared toward sexual and gender minorities. Sunil Babu Pant’s non-governmental organization, Blue Diamond Society, has been using some of these funds to build a LGBTI community center in Kathmandu modeled on the New York LGBT Center. It would be the first such community center in South Asia.
In an additional progressive move, the 2011 Nepali census was the first in the world to allow citizens to identify as male, female, or third gender. The process was highly flawed, and the inclusion of the category appears to have been mostly a superficial gesture at this point (the data on people who identified themselves as third gender is not linked to any other demographic numbers), but such steps toward implementation indicate a growing level of acceptance of the LGBTI community in Nepal, and presage the comprehensive reform expected.
As a Member of Parliament and the Constituent Assembly, Sunil Pant sits on the fundamental rights chapter drafting committee in the Constituent Assembly. The fundamental rights chapter is finished, and follows the Court’s orders to be completely inclusive of LGBTI citizens in all rights and protections. Now it sits rotting as a special sub-committee debates the details of power sharing and state structure. Since the constitutional deadline was last extended, Pant has refused to take his salary from the government, saying he cannot take money if no work is being done on the draft.
Whether the constitution drafting process will be completed by the extended deadline – just over two months away – is certainly on Bhattarai’s mind. But in the meantime if he wants to show the Nepali people that he takes human rights and his own judiciary seriously, he has an easy way to do that: a flick of his pen could order all administrative offices across the country to obey the law and recognized third gender citizens.
The Court decision demonstrated substantial progress, but the LGBTI community has been waiting for too long for something real to happen.
On Friday, Bhattari spoke at The New School. I asked him via Twitter when he would keep his promise. He replied: “We have in principal agreed that we will provide citizenship – even our Supreme Court has given a ruling in that context. So the government is committed to implement that.â€
Hari Phuyal, the prominent Kathmandu lawyer who tried the 2007 Supreme Court case says, “the Court decision came at such a crucial time, when the LGBTI community was misused and mishandled by the law enforcement agencies in Nepal.†The violence against LGBTI people has largely ceased thanks to successful advocacy and publicity, but now is another crucial moment, and there is one man who can make the difference.
 (Image: Baburam Bhattarai)
Kyle Knight is a Fulbright Scholar in Nepal where his research focuses on the LGBTI rights movement. He previously worked at Human Rights Watch, where he focused on children’s rights issue. For three years, he worked as a suicide prevention counselor for LGBTQ youth at the Trevor Project in New York City. He currently sits on the Trevor Project’s Advocacy and Public Policy Committee, is the president of the Duke University LGBT Network, and a is lecturer in Gender Studies at Tribhuvan University, Nepal’s state-run university in Kathmandu. You can follow him on Twitter @knightktm.
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A longtime Pennsylvania judge who ran as a Democrat is dropping his affiliation with the Democratic Party over what he sees as antisemitism, and U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) is weighing in.
Justice David Wecht “said in a statement he is switching his party affiliation to independent due to an ‘acquiescence to Jew-hatred’ becoming ‘disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,'” Politico reported.
“I can no longer abide this. So, I won’t,” said Wecht, who once served as vice chair of the state Democratic Party. “I am no longer registered within any political party.”
Judge Wecht said that antisemitism used to be found more often on the far right, but since the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018, he said, “that same hatred has grown on the left.”
“Increasingly, it has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. It is the duty of all good people to fight this virus, and to do so before it is too late,” he said.
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Lamenting that the Democratic Party has “changed,” Wecht said that “hateful anti-Jewish invective and actions are minimized, ignored, and even coddled.”
Senator Fetterman, whose own intention to stay affiliated with the Democratic Party has been questioned, knows Judge Wecht, according to Fox News.
“I know David and his legendary father, Cyril,” Fetterman wrote in a post on X. “As I’ve affirmed, I’m not changing my party — but I fully understand David’s personal choice.”
Fetterman also appeared to agree with Wecht, saying that the “Democratic Party must confront its own rising antisemitism problem.”
Pittsburgh’s NPR station WESA reports that Fetterman, “like Wecht a Pennsylvania Democrat, has also criticized the party, particularly in recent days as Democrats in Maine seem all but certain to nominate Graham Platner, who had a Nazi tattoo, as their candidate to challenge Republican Susan Collins for her Senate seat.”
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Last also notes that in this “winner-take-everything” political world that America may be entering, what President Joe Biden did for red states proved to be unhelpful for Democrats, and helped voters push him out.
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Biden’s theory, Last argues, was that “the way to leach the poison of Trumpism out of America was to forgive Republicans and shower them with goodies to prove that he was on their side, too.”
“The notion was that, in exchange, they would reward him politically, or at least be less hostile in their overall political outlook.”
That did not work.
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“Democratic deterrence didn’t work,” Last writes.
He points to Democratic states that moved to redistrict after Texas, and notes that the two sides were coming up about even.
But then, Florida moved to redistrict, with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis “doing an end run around the law” to get more GOP seats.
And then, the Supreme Court “rushed to insert itself into the fight by pushing out the Callais decision in time for Southern states to get rid of a bunch of black congressional districts.”
At this point, for Democrats to take back majority control of the House, they will need to “win the national popular vote by more than 4 percentage points.”
This status quo, says Last, is “not sustainable.”
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Image: Public Domain by Architect of the Capitol via Flickr
Capitol Hill Republicans leery or opposed to voting to spend $1 billion in security enhancements for President Donald Trump’s already-controversial White House ballroom are being courted by administration officials trying to win their favor.
The head of the U.S. Secret Service, Sean Curran, is meeting on Tuesday with Senate Republicans, Politico reports, and he is expected to “face several senators who aren’t convinced or are outright opposed to green-lighting the money.”
Politico notes that Curran is expected to pitch the need for the funds in part as necessary to help the agency “keep up broadly with growing threats.”
The Secret Service has been under scrutiny over attempted assassinations of President Trump, including the latest, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Trump and administration officials used the event to promote the need for the ballroom, although it’s unlikely the WHCA dinner would be held in a White House ballroom.
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House Republicans also appear uncomfortable with the political optics of voting to spend $1 billion on security for a ballroom.
Politico reports “a growing number of Republicans are complaining” the inclusion of the $1 billion in funds in immigration legislation “sends a tone-deaf message as voters struggle with higher gas and grocery prices.”
“It’s a bad look. It’s bad timing. It’s bad all around,” one House Republican told Politico.
In private, House Republican leaders are doubtful the measure will have the votes to pass, but they hope the $1 billion gets stripped out of the bill while it is in the hands of the Senate, before it reaches the House.
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