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UK Ties Foreign Aid To LGBT Rights

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In a bold move, the British government announced this week its new policy of tying foreign aid to LGBT human rights situations in countries it supports. The announcement – perhaps the strongest statement in support of LGBT rights made by a major donor government to date – has been met by LGBT activists in developing countries with a mix of jubilation and trepidation.

“Blue Diamond Society welcomes this news and urges other donors to follow this example,” said Sunil Babu Pant, a member of Nepal’s Parliament and a leading LGBT activist, in reaction to the news.

In Kenya, gay activist and politician David Kuria supported the move and compared it with other ties between aid and rights in Kenya’s history. He told LGBT Asylum News, “[Pressure from donors] is what made the [Kenyan President Daniel arap] Moi autocracy give in to internal democratic struggles and human rights activists in Kenya during the late 1980s and 1990s.”

But the expressions of support and excitement were quickly matched with concern.

LGBT Asylum News reported that Joseph Sewedo Akoro, Executive Director of The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIER) in Nigeria expressed concern, “what if this strategy of aid cut exacerbates human rights violation on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity?”

“Many countries in the global south are becoming sick of neo-colonialism and the global north’s imperialism. Therefore, they are planning strategies to become autonomous of foreign aid and challenge the hegemony of the Global north. Should they be succeed in this endeavour, this aid cut strategy will be counter productive.”

Jamaican LGBT activist Maurice Tomlinson believes in the power of donor countries to promote rights, but suggests they “employ more sophisticated approaches to addressing homophobic governments, instead of simply resorting to cutting aid.”

Tomlinson told Paul Canning that “targeted approaches will yield better results than a high handed neo-colonial … posture of cutting aid which will only serve to alienate entire national populations, along with useful allies.”

The British government made moves this year suggestive of its position on LGBT rights and aid, but no policy had been discussed until this week. For example, Malawi has received £200 million (about $316 million) from Britain over the past three years, suffered a £19 million (about $30 million) cut in their aid from after two men were prosecuted for getting married to each other.

The cuts caused government backlash against Malawian civil society organizations known for supporting LGBT rights.

But in spite of the repercussions, Prime Minister David Cameron’s proud and notorious comments about the Malawi aid cuts this summer presaged this policy shift. While hosting his second Downing Street LGBT reception in June, the PM said the government would continue to pressure governments, specifically those in Africa, on gay rights. “I’m very proud of the fact we [put] huge pressure on the leader of Malawi about an issue in that country,” he said in a speech given to the small crowd without notes, “but I’m convinced we can do more.”

Ghana has also recently come into the LGBT rights spotlight and, as Paul Canning reports, some sources say that West African country’s aid from the UK is in jeopardy due to recent increases in anti-gay moves by the government. But with this official UK policy freshly minted, the implementation is yet to be seen. In contrast to the threats to make cuts, other recent public documents claim that the UK government will increase its development assistance to Ghana in coming years.

While tying aid directly to observations of LGBT rights situations might be a novel strategy, donor country involvement in local LGBT movements is nothing new.

The European Union has taken a similarly vocal stance against countries with poor LGBT rights records. As reported by EU Observer, Loius Michel, former EU Development Commissioner expressed strongly that the EU, “will never accept that governments or politicians may use, or even exploit, any ‘cultural’ argument in an attempt to justify the hunt and demonisation of homosexuality.”

Material support for LGBT civil society groups has ranged from the casual to the official. For example, the first plastic chairs for Nepal’s Blue Diamond Society’s initial secret meetings were donated by American Peace Corps volunteers. Soon after, BDS had its first official grant – from USAID.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hinted at the United States’ current position on its influence on LGBT rights around the world in a June 27, 2011 “pride” speech.  She said she was proud of “the day-to-day work of our embassies and AID missions around the world to increase engagement around the issues affecting LGBT rights, especially in those places where people are at risk of violence, discrimination, or criminalization.”

As debate foments around this current announcement by the British government, discussions on the proper methods for exerting moral authority in developing countries will arise. There is no question that foreign influence has buttressed local LGBT rights movements around the world. However there is also little doubt that colonial influence established many of the discriminatory laws that LGBT activists are challenging today.

Whether this move by the UK will be the powerful tool that activists in the global south have been waiting for, or too blunt an instrument for such delicate work remains to be seen.

 

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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News

Trump Sues Murdoch Over WSJ’s Epstein Birthday Letter Story

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July 18, 2025

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President Donald Trump is reportedly suing Rupert Murdoch and Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, over the publication of a story alleging he sent a “bawdy” birthday letter in 2003 to Jeffrey Epstein, the now-notorious convicted sex offender who died in 2019.

“Court records show that Trump filed a lawsuit alleging libel against Murdoch, the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones, and the reporters who wrote the article in federal court for the Southern District of Florida,” CNBC reported late Friday afternoon.

Trump vehemently denied the Journal’s report and publicly threatened to sue after it was published. The Journal had reported in its story that Trump had warned he would take legal action if the story ran.

“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Thursday night. “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his a– off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”

READ MORE: FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi

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FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi

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1 day ago

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July 18, 2025

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One thousand employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through thousands of pages of the Epstein files were instructed to flag any mentions of President Donald Trump, according to Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee.

“According to information my office received,” Senator Durbin wrote in a letter (below) to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday, “you…pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel…on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” Durbin charged.

The files are from the criminal investigation into the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of child sex offenses.

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In his letter, Senator Durbin also posed a series of more than a dozen questions to Bondi. Among them:

“Have you personally reviewed all files in DOJ’s possession related to Jeffrey Epstein?”

“The records DOJ released on February 27 did not include a client list. Why did you
publicly claim on February 21 that the client list was ‘sitting on my desk right now to review’?”

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?”

“Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.”

“What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

CNBC reported that “Durbin asked the Justice Department and FBI to explain what his office called ‘apparent discrepancies’ regarding handling of the Epstein files and findings from a Justice Department memo.”

In his four-page letter, Durbin also wrote, “in 2002, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’ Just yesterday, it was reported that the Department previously reviewed a ‘leather-bound album’ comprised of dozens of letters from Mr. Epstein’s friends in celebration of his 50th birthday in 2003.”

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“The letters were collected by Mr. Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell and included one from President Trump that allegedly ‘contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker … and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist.'”

“Despite tens of thousands of personnel hours reviewing and re-reviewing these Epstein- related records over the course of two weeks in March, it took DOJ more than three additional months to officially find there is ‘no incriminating ‘client list,’ and the memorandum with this finding includes no mention of the whistleblower or additional documents, the existence of which you publicly claimed on February 27.”

Read a copy of Senator Durbin’s letter below or at this link.

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‘Would the President Say This?’: Rubio Demands Diplomats Echo Trump

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July 18, 2025

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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after cutting 1,300 employees last week, is now ordering diplomats to not comment on foreign elections and internal affairs—limiting official communications to congratulating the declared winner.

“Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats not to comment on the legitimacy or fairness of foreign elections, breaking with decades of American diplomatic practice,” The Daily Beast reports. In a memo, the Secretary stated that U.S. missions will no longer issue election-related statements unless there is a “clear and compelling” foreign policy reason for doing so.

“Diplomatic personnel writing official messages are instead instructed to ask themselves: ‘Would the President say this?'”

The memo, seen by Reuters, says the messages “should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests.”

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The memo makes clear, based on President Trump’s remarks, that the U.S. will “pursue partnerships with countries wherever our strategic interests align,” regardless of democratic values.

U.S. promotion of human rights, democracy, and press freedoms has traditionally been a “core foreign policy objective,” Reuters reported.

“Under Trump, the administration has increasingly moved away from the promotion of democracy and human rights, largely seeing it as interference in another country’s affairs.”

The Washington Post adds that for “decades, the United States has offered judgments on whether elections were conducted in a free or fair matter [sic], a judgment that can have significant impact in countries.”

“Scholars have accused the United States of democratic backsliding since Trump, who refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, returned to office this year.

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended right-wing and far-right political groups, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which reportedly has ties to right-wing extremists.

Secretary Rubio in May ignited a “spat” with Germany’s foreign ministry when it “hit back…after he criticized the decision to classify the Alternative for Germany party as a ‘right-wing extremist’ organization,” the Associated Press reported at the time.

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