ILGA-Europe announces 6th call for proposals for its Human Rights Violations Documentation Fund

The goals of the Fund are:

• to work towards LGBT equality by gathering evidence of human rights violations and supporting evidence-based advocacy throughout Europe
• to promote documentation of cases of discrimination, hate crimes and other human rights violations against LGBT people according to the international human rights documentation standards
• to build capacity of LGBT organisations in Europe to monitor and document human rights violations on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression
• to enable use of well-documented information for advocacy purposes at the national level
• to develop methodology and tools that can be replicated in other European countries for collection of reliable information on human rights violations

The Fund will support small and medium-scale projects (up to 5,000 euros with no minimum amount requirement), intended to produce reports on the situation and cases of today and immediate past with a potential to be used for advocacy purposes. Historical projects are not eligible.

The following are some of the documentation themes supported by the Fund in the previous calls:

• human rights violations by law-enforcement authorities
• discrimination of LGBT people in prisons
• discrimination and hate crimes on the grounds of gender identity and expression
• access of LGBT people to healthcare or education
• hate crimes and hate speech (including in media)
• quantitative studies (e.g. based on questionnaires) on human rights violations and discrimination
• publication of already collected information and its use for advocacy purposes in form of public debates, presentations, press-conferences, publication and distribution to decision makers and shapers, etc.

The above is just an indicative list of themes, the applicants are encouraged to work on any theme they believe is important in their context and has an advocacy potential at the national and European levels. The information contained in the documentation reports may subsequently be used by ILGA-Europe in its lobbying activities with the European institutions: European Union, Council of Europe and the OSCE. For example, the reports previously supported by the Fund have been used in submissions for country reports by the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner, universal periodic review by the UN Human Rights Council, OSCE annual hate crimes reports, etc.

Eligibility criteria:

• proposals will be accepted from officially registered with local authorities LGBT organisations or unregistered initiative groups (in countries, where there are no registered LGBT NGOs);
• countries eligible are Western NIS (Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus), Southern Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), the Western Balkans (Albania and former Yugoslavia), the 12 new EU member states and Turkey;
• for projects on documentation of human rights violations on the grounds of gender identity and expression ALL European countries are eligible

We strongly advise you to read supporting information on the documentation process, including more detailed guidelines on the application process, on our web-site before starting to fill in the application form. You can find this information below. For quantitative projects on discrimination faced by LGB people we advise you to consult ILGA-Europe Guidelines on Documenting and Reporting Sexual Orientation Discrimination. Your proposals will be evaluated taking into account the capacity of your organisation to implement the project, the goals of the project, detailed description of methodology you will use for documentation, advocacy potential of the information collected and how you plan in concrete ways to use this potential.

Irrespective of the phase of documentation or dissemination process, the applicants have to fill in the entire application form. If you apply for documentation and dissemination / advocacy, the grants will be transferred in two installments. ILGA-Europe will first transfer the amount budgeted for documentation, and will review its quality upon receipt of the contents (e.g. text or video) of the specific project product. Based on results of the review, a decision will be made on disbursement of the amount budgeted for use / advocacy activities, and the transfer will be carried out.

ILGA-Europe can also support dissemination / advocacy component only for the purposes of publication (print, internet, CD, etc.) and / or use of documented data for advocacy. To apply for this grant, you already need to have information collected, organised and analysed. The applicants are still required to fill in the entire application form and to attach the information they want to disseminate to their application. A budget should be annexed. It should not exceed 5,000 euros. A maximum of 20% of the budget can go to overhead expenses (office costs). All other costs are eligible if justified by the needs of the project.

You can submit your application or ask any questions about the Fund by e-mail: maxim@ilga-europe.org. The deadline for the fifth round of applications is 20 DECEMBER 2008. The decision will be made by a board of independent experts within 1 month from the time the proposal was submitted.

ILGA-Europe looks forward to your applications and wishes you luck!