Over a year has passed since Mounir Baatour announced in August that he was running for the presidency in Tunisia as the first openly gay candidate. A month after the presidential campaign, Baatour fled to France to seek refuge from the death threats he received from Islamist parties in Tunisia. Governments in the region vary in their disregard for human rights in general โ and LGBTQ rights in particular โ and they all participate in disseminating homophobia through policies and the persecution of the LGBTQ community, often emboldening abuse and lynching.
He views his presidential candidacy as a political strategy to encourage the 26 presidential candidates at the time to express their opinions about LGBTQ rights. Over people were arrested in on the basis of homosexuality, according to data he compiled with rights groups. In the case of Tunisia, LGBTQ advocates, including Baatour, pushed for abolishing Article , which punishes homosexuality for up to three years in prison.
The Tunisian queer community became empowered by the wave of protests in , which shaped new social standards. They became vocal about LGBTQ rights and successfully called on international human rights organizations to pressure the country into stopping the practice of anal examinations, which was used to determine sexual orientation and prosecute homosexuality. They often involve medical personnel forcibly inserting fingers or a tube into the anus to search for sperm as a means of determining whether sexual conduct had taken place.
The HRW report states that these examinations lack evidentiary value and are a form of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that may, in some cases, amount to torture. This was followed by mass arrests targeting the gay community in the country. Those arrested included the late Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazi, who committed suicide in June in Canada at the age of 30 years, after long suffering from her imprisonment for raising the rainbow flag at the concert.
A software developer and an openly gay woman, Hegazi was detained three months after her arrest. She said she was tortured by electrocution and sexually harassed by female inmates; she wrote about this in March in a testimony published in Daaarb, a socialist publication. By the end of , around two people were being arrested every other week in Egypt on grounds of homosexuality, according to Fouad โ not his real name โ one of the underground cofounders of a group called Solidarity with LGBTQ Egypt that documents crackdowns.
