The Human Rights Conference, Miami Beach

01When and where

The official conference page gave the dates as 26 to 28 May 2017 and the venue as the Loews Hotel, 1601 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. It described the event as a gathering of human-rights activists, researchers, legal scholars and organisations, and it ran an open call for presentation abstracts.

The organisers called it the 4th Global LGBTQI Human Rights Conference, counting the conferences held at the three earlier World OutGames. A human-rights conference was a condition of every event GLISA sanctioned as an Outgames; Wikipedia’s article on GLISA describes it as the association’s way of tying sport to LGBT rights. The first, in Montréal in 2006, produced the Declaration of Montréal.

People sending abstracts were asked to pick a category and to tick the regions their topic concerned, from Africa and Asia to the Caribbean, the Middle East and Oceania. Wikipedia names the three tracks as Inclusivity in Sports, Health and Wellness, and Global Social Justice.

02The plenary speakers

The plenary list was the most international part of the 2017 programme. It opened with Professor Vitit Muntarbhorn of Thailand, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in September 2016 as the first UN Independent Expert on violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Fabrice Houdart, a human rights officer at the UN human rights office in New York, was listed beside him.

Other plenary speakers included U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz; Tamara Adrián, a member of the National Assembly of Venezuela; the writer and activist Omar Sharif Jr.; Richard Lusimbo of Sexual Minorities Uganda; Kenita Placide of the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality; Nadine Smith of Equality Florida; Moninne Griffith of the Irish youth organisation BeLonG To; and Yahia Zaidi, an Algerian activist from a Middle East and North Africa network. Sport had its own voices: the Olympic swimmers Mark Tewksbury of Canada and Amini Fonua of Tonga, the transgender athlete and activist Chris Mosier, and Lou Englefield of Pride Sports UK.

03Workshops and trainings

Below the plenaries sat a long list of approved workshops and panels. Presenters came from Bangladesh, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, India, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Sri Lanka, among other countries, on tracks that included transgender rights, ageing, health, politics and the criminalisation of same-sex relations. Robert Wintemute, one of the two drafters of the Declaration of Montréal in 2006, was listed in the sports track.

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Special trainings came from organisations with a practical brief. The Victory Institute ran a campaign and candidacy session for people thinking of standing for office. GLAAD offered media training on telling personal stories to journalists. The It Gets Better project gave media training for Latin America, and the FARE network hosted a panel on homophobia in football in Latin America. The Miami Beach Police Department presented the diversity training it had given its officers since autumn 2015, and the local groups SAVE and YES Institute ran sessions on reducing prejudice and on communication.

The International Gay and Lesbian Football Association organised a panel titled “LGBTQI Rights & Advocacy in the Era of Trump”, with speakers from Marriage Equality USA, Equality Florida and SAVE. A screening of “Migrant Dreams”, a documentary about migrant farm workers in Ontario, was also on the schedule.

04Partners and sponsors

Organisations named as partners included ILGA North America, ARC International, the Victory Institute, the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality and J-FLAG. Sponsors listed on the page included the British Consulate General in Miami, Global Affairs Canada, the European Gay & Lesbian Sport Federation, OutRight Action International and the International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights.

A “Sponsor an Activist” scheme asked for $2,000 per person to cover a return flight, four nights in a South Beach hotel and the conference fee for an activist with an approved abstract who could not otherwise afford to travel.

05After 26 May

When the organisers cancelled the ceremonies and most of the sport on 26 May 2017, their statement said that the Human Rights Conference and the cultural programmes would continue as planned. The conference did run over its three days. Wikipedia’s summary describes it as very poorly attended: speakers who had expected hundreds of listeners found only a few and turned their presentations into round-table discussions.

The published programme therefore records what was planned rather than what was heard. Which sessions ran in full, and which speakers travelled to give them, is not documented in the sources used here. The wider story of the cancellation is on the Miami 2017 page.

06Frequently asked questions