Kicking off ILGA-Europe’s 14th annual conference

Saskia Joreen's picture

By Saskia Joreen on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - 22:46

The largest gathering of LGBTI activists in Europe starts in The Hague (the Netherlands) tomorrow, October 28, in the form of the 14th Annual Conference of ILGA-Europe.

Over 200 activists from 37 European countries will take part in the Conference, which will also be attended by several members of our eurOut staff.

The theme of this year’s Conference is ‘Expressing our differences, challenging our prejudices, developing our alliances.’ Through expert input and thematic workshops, participants will explore the diversity within LGBTI communities and reflect on internal prejudices within the LGBTI communities towards other minority groups.

Participants will also be discussing how we can, with other groups, build a stronger and united European movement for social and legal changes for equality and human rights for all.

Evelyne Paradis, ILGA-Europe’s Executive Director, said:

This conference is about diversity within the LGBTI community and about challenging the stereotypes within this community. Notably about stereotypes regarding gender, disability and race. That’s important because we can’t, for instance, work together with anti-racism organizations when we have racist prejudices ourselves.

We’re not expecting to solve all LGBTI problems in the four days of this conference, but we want to start a debate and try to find commonalities within our European LGBTI communities while also balancing diversity. Our approach is that there is more common ground than we think.

Evelyne Paradis (middle) with Martin K.I. Christensen (left) and Juris Lavrikovs (right) / © Saskia Joreen for eurOut.org

The Conference participants will explore the Conference theme with a number of distinguished speakers from various backgrounds and movements, like Myria Vassiliadou, the Secretary General of the European Women’s Lobby, and Mieke Verloo, academic, researcher and distinguished author in the fields of equality policies, feminist methodology and social movements.

Check out ILGA-Europe’s website for more information about the conference and also be sure to keep an eye on eurOut!

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