Conference Report - 7th ILGA Asia Conference - Foreword from ILGA Asia Executive Board
Dear members, friends and colleagues,
The 7th ILGA Asia Regional Conference successfully concluded on the 8th of December 2017. The ILGA Asia Executive Board is pleased to send to you the Conference Report to review all the activities that took place.
During the 5-day conference, ILGA Asia and the host organization Rainbow Community Kampuchea welcomed 281 participants and 41 member organizations from 35 countries in Asia and beyond to participate in numerous heated discussions, social gatherings and to ignite the spirit of the Asian LGBTI community.
With limited resources, we were able to bring in 74 persons through our scholarship program: 10 of whom self-identified as intersex, 23 identified as lesbian, bisexual and queer woman (trans and cis), 20 identified as trans, and 20 identified as gay, bisexual and queer man (trans and cis); 27 of whom were under the age of 30. We wanted to ensure that the conference reflected the diversity of our communities in Asia, and we were glad that most people we talked to at the conference could feel such diversity in the atmosphere. The presence of all other participants would not have been made possible without the generous support from our partners in the region and around the world, and the personal contribution from individual LGBTI activists.
For the first time ever, ILGA Asia hosted a bisexual pre-conference, an interfaith pre-conference, and a youth caucus. Within 5 days, the Asian LGBTI community has produced strong recommendations and concrete actions that have been approved by all of the members present and will be shown in this report. ILGA Asia and all of our members are committed to follow up and execute these ideas until we meet again. More importantly, we were extremely happy to see that the conference, a space where we could freely and safely be ourselves, share our tears and laughters, had remained so and continued to exist, despite challenges and unfortunate incidents in the past. We were so proud of the moment when our community was storming the congested streets of Phnom Penh and waving high the rainbow flags on the tuk-tuk, posing our best positions in front of the Cambodian monumental landmarks.
We want to thank all of our members, friends and colleagues for your presence and active engagement at the conference; thank our donors and sponsors for providing us the financial mean to create this safe space for the Asian LGBTI community. Finally, we thank RoCK and all the volunteers for hosting the conference. We hope to see you again at the 8th Asian conference in Seoul, South Korea in 2019.
Manisha Dhakal and Mani AQ, Co-chairs of ILGA Asia, on behalf of the ILGA Asia Executive Board
