Prides, prejudices and the Human Rights Committee: What do we do with the master’s tool?
I am an international lawyer. International lawyers bring cases to international bodies that adopt international decisions. A heavy book living on a shelf in my home office states that such decisions ‘represent a considered assessment of alleged violations against a particular factual background … with a determination of admissibility, violation or otherwise’. 1 Dry legal technical terminology. But international lawyers – at least, some of us – also know the other side of international cases. Their human faces, their human struggles, their healing (or not) potential. Exactly ten years ago, it was a sunny Saturday in Saint Petersburg, and I woke up thinking about some easy stuff. And then I’ve got a message from a friend – something serious was happening just 700 meters from my apartment, at the Field of Mars, where fellow activists gathered for an LGBT pride demonstration. There was an aggressive crowd attacking the activists, there was violence against them, and the police start...