Can Gay Rights be Human Rights?

UCL Law Journal to Host International Gay Rights Panel

The UCL Jurisprudence Review, the first student law journal of the United Kingdom, is proud to announce an international panel on Friday 15 October 2010 to look at whether gay rights can be imagined as human rights.

In view of the ongoing gay rights debates in India, Uganda, Europe, America and elsewhere, the panel will explore some reasons behind the marginal status of gay issues within legal rights discourse. What engenders the relative invisibility of such issues within national and international law? Can arguments based on cultural relativity and sensitivity justify opposition to gay equality?

A panel of distinguished speakers will address these issues to an audience of students, academics, lawyers, and the broader public at the University College London’s Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre.

Speakers include:

Peter Tatchell, global human rights activist, a co-founder of the LGBT direct action group OutRage! and regular contributor to The Guardian’s Comment is Free section;

Hayley Gorenberg, deputy legal director for Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest gay rights organisation in the US. Gorenberg was lead counsel in legal action against Cirque du Soleil on behalf of performer Matthew Cusick, which resulted in the largest award ever for an HIV-discrimination complaint settled with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission;

Leslie Moran, professor at Birkbeck College, London. Moran is the author of The Homosexuality of Law and recently delivered the ninth annual Stonewall Lecture;

Mayur Suresh, a practicing lawyer in Delhi working closely with the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. Suresh is representing the Voices Against 377 collective in the legal action against India’s sodomy law; and

Robert Wintemute, professor at King’s College London. Wintemute has participated in gay and lesbian equality cases before the European Court of Human Rights, the European Union Court of Justice, and the Supreme Courts of Argentina, Massachusetts and the United States.

The UCL Jurisprudence Review is an annual collection of essays in jurisprudence published by an independent student group at the University College London Faculty of Laws. The panel celebrates the launch of the sixteenth volume of the Review, which has been published since 1994.

For information about this event, please visit gayrights.eventbrite.com or contact Yuvraj Joshi at y.joshi@ucl.ac.uk.

For information about the Review, please visit www.ucljr.com and follow 'UCL Jurisprudence Review' on Facebook.

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