Documentation and Advocacy

Work on supporting organisations in documenting and reporting human rights violations is an important part of our strategy. Properly collected and analysed evidence of LGBTI human rights violations is one of the key elements of successful advocacy work.

With this in mind, we provide organisations with funding and learning opportunities to start or continue their documentation work on the national level and to strengthen LGBTI advocacy capabilities.

At ILGA-Europe, we build our European-level advocacy work partially on reports from our member organisations and partners. These reports entail documented cases and first-hand information – valuable evidence that supports and helps guide our strategic approaches in advocacy work. Also, systematic documentation of LGBTI human rights violations helps to monitor developments in the country and the region, while evidence-based reports become an important tool in supporting advocacy work of organisations-members on the national level.

Overview of the calls under the Fund

In the first 10 years since the targeted work on Documentation and Advocacy was launched in 2006, 14 calls for proposals were held. Under each call ILGA-Europe supported from 3 to 11 organisations depending on the subject of the call, funds availability, and quality of the grant applications totalling to 82 projects with budgets from EUR2.000 up to EUR10.000 throughout the period. The subjects documented under each call varied and covered issues like Hate Crime and Hate Speech, Transphobia and violations of the human rights of transgender people, social exclusion of the LGBTI people, discrimination in the fields of Education, Employment, Health in many countries across the Europe. Each supported project resulted into an advocacy report that was used by the grantees on the national and international levels as well as by ILGA-Europe to feed in and shape our advocacy work on the EU level.

Most recent calls

Here you can find more details about the calls since 2016:

XVI call for proposals: LGBTI Hate Crime

The Hate Crime call was implemented in 2017 with the goal to support documentation of incidence of homophobic and transphobic violence in European countries where there is still lack of collected evidence of LGBTI Hate Crimes.

The Hate Crime call was implemented in 2017 with the goal to support documentation of incidence of homophobic and transphobic violence in European countries where there is still lack of collected evidence of LGBTI Hate Crimes. This data collection call has been devised to feed in ILGA-Europe’s evidence based advocacy strategy in favour of hate crime legislation and policy measures to tackle hate crime. The funding offered under this call enabled the grantees to:

  • develop the skills to produce good quality and comparable evidence of incidence of violence experienced by LGBTI people;
  • produce a report on homophobic and transphobic hate crimes in their country, which will in turn allow ILGA-Europe to compile data at European level at the end of 2017;
  • increase the visibility of the issue of homophobic and transphobic violence at national and European levels.

The projects were implemented from February 2017 to February 2018 and the following organisations implement projects under this call:

XV call for proposals: Data-collection on the Situation of Rainbow Families in Europe

The call was implemented in 2016-2017 and specifically focuses on data-collection regarding the situations of rainbow families, including same-sex couples, families with trans parents and single LGBTI parents, across Europe.

It focuses on the lack of recognition and on discriminatory practices when it comes to the partnership and parenting rights of rainbow families. More specifically, selected projects aim to document:

  • The non-recognition of co-parents of children born to rainbow families or adopted by them.
  • The lack of access of rainbow families to adoption and to foster parenting.
  • The lack of recognition of the rights of trans parents, in particular when they have gone through a change of legal gender, regarding guardianship, school activities, social benefits, etc.
  • The lack of access to reproductive health and rights for rainbow families.
  • Forced sterilisation of trans people, disabling them from having children.
  • The lack of access to social rights as a partner. 
  • The lack of access to goods and services accessible to different-sex couples (housing, consumption goods, hotels, etc.).
  • How cases of discrimination have a cross-border aspect (e.g. recognised couples in one country that are discriminated against in another country).

The following organisations implemented projects under this call:

XIV call for proposals: data-collection of LGBTI discrimination in employment

In 2015-2016 ILGA-Europe implemented the XIV call for proposals within its Documentation and Advocacy Fund. This call was focused specifically on data-collection of discriminatory practices in the field of employment. The total number of grants awarded under this call is 8. The fund is supported by the government of the Netherlands and an anonymous donor.

The specific goal of this call is to allocate grants to document existing discrimination in access to and in employment for LGBTI people in selected countries across Europe. More specifically, selected projects aim to:

  • Allow for a better analysis of the importance of anti-discrimination legislation in employment, but also the effectiveness of accompanying measures that help reduce day to day discriminatory actions in the workplace
  • Explore the specific barriers faced by trans and/or intersex persons, LGBTI people from a minority ethnic background, older LGBTI people, LGBTI people with disabilities, in the employment field and identifying needs in this area (e.g. data collection to explore specific barriers faced by LGBTI persons or their specific needs in employment field based on structured interviews with them)
  • Analyse LGBTI inclusive or/and discriminatory policies adopted and implemented by employers / state institutions and what impact they have in different countries (e.g.  analysis of relevant existing policies and comparisons with other regions/countries, interviews with policy makers in charge of employment policies contents, exploring the level of β€˜heteronormativity’ in employment policies)
  • Collect and analyse data on different employers’ (state, business, private) competence and attitudes in the field of LGBTI issues (quantitative surveys to be filled to self-assess their level of knowledge & know-how and surveys to assess awareness and attitudes of relevant personnel in different institutions)
  • Encourage cross-border projects, to facilitate the sharing of a methodology for documenting LGBTI discrimination in employment and allowing exchange of good practices and cooperation on developing non-discrimination legislation and measures.

The following organisations implemented projects under this call:


To find out more about how ILGA-Europe can help with Documentation and Advocacy, contact our Senior Programmes Officer, Boris here.