The Council for Global Equality has recently published a guide called “Accessing US Embassies: A Guide for LGBT Human Rights Defenders” to assist non-US NGOs to help them understand how to access support from US embassies around the world.
The guide is particularly useful for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists and NGOs in various countries outside the United states “to help them understand how U.S. embassies work; how to call on U.S. diplomats to support their human rights goals; how to access U.S. support, including both technical and financial support; and how to frame requests in ways that will appeal to strategic U.S. priorities.”
“The guide also emphasizes the limits of U.S. embassy support and the potential that exists for backlash in some hostile environments. By presenting both the opportunities and potential pitfalls of U.S. embassy engagement, and by highlighting those with concrete examples, the Council aims to provide both the information and the context that will allow individual human rights defenders and organizations to decide for themselves whether they want to approach U.S. embassies as partners in their work.”
Besides providing financial support to human rights projects, US embassies around the world have also been involved in providing shelter to human rights activities to protect them from any persecution from their own governments. In order to seek help from the embassies, it is important to understand how it functions, in what way it responds and how is it organized. With this guide, NGOs will get a good understanding of the way US embassies work and support NGOs for defending human rights, espcially LGBT rights.
The guide is available for free and it can be downloaded from this link.
