LGBTI equality and human rights in Europe and Central Asia

Assistance in security issues for members organisations

In June ILGA-Europe organised 2 security events: one 3-day security in-country session for an organisation from Eastern Europe and a 2-day security training for activists from Balkan countries.

Both events consisted of theoretical modules accompanied by practical exercises and interactive activities where the activists learned the main principles of assessing risks and threats for their organisations and individuals working in the organisations and obtained knowledge and skills on ensuring and preventing physical and digital aggression when working on human rights issues.

During the in-country session the staff of the organisation learned how to assess organisational capacity to establish secure environment for work and developed a medium-term security plan for the NGO. The follow-up step of the session is to develop individual security assessment for each staff member and to start implementation of the elaborated documents.

The training included, next to the above described, the exercises on peer learning and experience sharing between the participants on such issues as physical security during public event and working to protect digital organisational data as well as challenges and obstacles organisations face in their everyday work. A special session on how to prepare and to hold a Pride March in a hostile environment has been delivered by an expert from our member organisation “Mozaika” to answer the needs of the training participants.

ILGA-Europe is planning to follow up this activities by assisting the organisations to elaborate, put in practice, and evaluate the implementation of organisational security plans to ensure secure work of LGBTI organisations in hostile environment.