Month: December 2025

Protection Briefing

Published to coincide with International Human Solidarity Day 2025

Protection Briefing: Protection Challenges and Advocacy Engagement for LGBTQ Refugees in Gorom Refugee Settlement, South Sudan

Prepared by: Trans Initiative Gorom

Period Covered: May 2025 – Present

Purpose: To highlight protection concerns, advocacy engagement, and priority needs of LGBTQ refugees

1. Executive Summary

Since May 2025, LGBTQ refugees in Gorom Refugee Settlement have experienced increased protection concerns linked to changes in settlement arrangements and heightened community tensions. These developments have contributed to fear, instability, and uncertainty regarding safety and access to protection. Through advocacy, documentation, and engagement with UNHCR and international partners, LGBTQ refugees and community advocates have sought protection-oriented responses and durable solutions. While engagement has helped reduce some immediate risks, significant protection gaps remain.

2. Background and Context

LGBTQ refugees in Gorom Refugee Settlement have faced long-standing vulnerabilities related to discrimination, visibility, and social exclusion across refugee settings over several years. These challenges have affected access to services, safety, and overall well-being.

Following arrival in Gorom, proposals were made to relocate LGBTQ refugees to alternative locations, including remote camp settings. Community members raised concerns regarding isolation, limited access to information, and potential protection risks in such environments. Advocacy and dialogue with UNHCR and other relevant actors emphasized the importance of protection-sensitive approaches and individual risk assessments.

As a result of this engagement, relocation to remote settings was paused, and individual-level processes were initiated. While challenges persisted in Gorom, these efforts reduced immediate exposure to heightened protection risks.

3. Engagement on Durable Solutions

Given the prolonged protection challenges faced by LGBTQ refugees, community advocates engaged UNHCR to explore durable solutions. Many LGBTQ refugees have experienced repeated insecurity across multiple displacement contexts, highlighting the need for long-term protection pathways.

In 2024, some cases were referred for resettlement consideration through established UNHCR processes. However, during the Trump administration, the United States refugee resettlement program was suspended, resulting in the interruption of these resettlement pathways and increased uncertainty for individuals already facing heightened protection risks.

4. Recent Developments and Protection Impact

In early 2025, new settlement-level directives affecting LGBTQ refugees contributed to increased fear, instability, and concerns about safety. These developments resulted in disruptions to daily life, increased movement, and heightened anxiety among LGBTQ refugees.

The situation underscored the need for:

  • Protection-sensitive programming
  • Non-discriminatory access to services
  • Individualized protection assessments
  • Continued engagement between UNHCR and affected communities

    • 5. Advocacy and Community Engagement

    LGBTQ refugees and community advocates prioritized advocacy, documentation, and engagement with UNHCR, international partners, and humanitarian actors to raise awareness of protection needs. These efforts focused on constructive dialogue, visibility of protection concerns, and strengthening community-based protection mechanisms.

    Advocacy contributed to increased attention from international actors and reinforced the importance of inclusive and protection-centered approaches within the broader refugee response.

    6. Ongoing Protection Gaps

    Despite continued engagement, key challenges remain:

  • Limited availability of durable solutions for LGBTQ refugees at heightened risk
  • Persistent fear and uncertainty regarding safety
  • Insufficient access to safe and inclusive shelter options
  • Limited availability of specialized psychosocial and protection support

    • 7. Priority Recommendations

    We respectfully encourage UNHCR, donor governments, and humanitarian partners to:

    • Expand resettlement opportunities for LGBTQ refugees facing heightened protection risks
    • Increase protection-focused funding for inclusive shelter, psychosocial support, and community-based protection
    • Ensure non-discriminatory protection practices across all refugee assistance and services
    • Strengthen protection monitoring and community engagement mechanisms
    • Continue dialogue with LGBTQ refugee-led groups to inform protection responses

    8. Positive Developments

    We acknowledge and appreciate the engagement of resettlement countries, including Canada, in providing protection pathways to some LGBTQ refugees from Gorom. These examples demonstrate the life-saving impact of targeted protection interventions and the importance of expanding such opportunities.

    9. Conclusion: A Shared Responsibility

    The situation of LGBTQ refugees in Gorom highlights both ongoing protection challenges and the value of sustained advocacy and engagement with UNHCR and international partners. Continued support is essential to ensure safety, dignity and access to durable solutions for LGBTQ refugees facing heightening risks.

    Donor governments supporting the humanitarian response in Gorom play a vital role and can further strengthen protection by expanding resettlement slots for LGBTQI refugees most at risk. UNHCR remains central to coordinating protection responses and advancing durable solutions through continued engagement with affected communities.

    Donors and humanitarian partners can support flexible, protection-focused funding that prioritizes safety, shelter, and psychosocial support. Activists and civil society can continue to raise awareness responsibly, amplify refugee voices, and advocate for inclusive protection pathways. Together, these actions can help ensure that LGBTQI refugees are not left without options for safety and dignity.

    See Also:

    Geoff Allshorn and others, 1 June 2025. “When I Needed A Neighbour, Were You There?”, Humanist World blog.

    Daniel Itai, 28 May 2024. “South Sudan refugee camp is ‘not a safe haven’ for LGBTQ residents”, Washington Blade.

    Joto La Jiwe, 8 August 2025. “LGBTQI+ refugees in South Sudan trapped between a rock and a hard place”, 76 Crimes.

    Abraham Junior, 20 June 2025. “The forgotten struggle: LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers in South Sudan”, Washington Blade.

    Abraham Junior, 2 September 2025. “We Exist, We Resist, We Are Not Invisible: Queer, Atheist, and Humanist Refugees in South Sudan”, The Humanist magazine.

    Paula Caro Rojas, 25 October 2024. “Surviving in the Gorom refugee camp in South Sudan”, Melting Pot Europa.

    Staff Writer, 21 June 2025. “LGBTQ+ Refugees in Gorom Denied Medical and Legal Help”, Radioyei.

    This blog ©2025 Geoff Allshorn. All rights hereby returned to the authors of this report, who can be contacted through me.
    I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

    The Scars That Opened the Way

    Written by Joseph K (He/Him)

    AI art

    Today marks exactly seven years since I took a stand for my community. On this day, as an LGBTIQ+ refugee who had fled persecution from my country, and after my own family excommunicated me because of my sexual orientation, I began advocating for more than 300 LGBTIQ+ refugees from Kakuma Refugee Camp: people who had endured violence, threats, and suffering for decades, simply for being who they are.

    On December 11, 2018
    fear filled the air,
    hate wrote death threats on walls,
    and even places meant for protection
    could not keep us safe.

    Yet we stood.
    Twenty-one were moved first —
    injured bodies, trembling spirits —
    to receive medication, shelter,
    and a chance at life beyond the camp.
    That moment opened the path
    to mass resettlement,
    to survival beyond Kakuma.

    I was the chairman.
    So I became the target.
    I paid with my body —
    my hand, my index finger, gone.
    When I see the scars,
    my memory runs back to that day,
    to pain that carried purpose,
    to sacrifice that saved lives.

    Three hundred souls
    pulled back from violence.
    Three hundred futures
    no longer written in fear.

    Today Joseph lives in Nairobi: alive, displaced, homeless and unbroken.

    “If these words reach you, I humbly ask for support for safe shelter, for dignity, and for the chance to celebrate Christmas not on the streets, but in safety and peace.” These scars are my testimony. They tell the world that courage has a cost and that love, even in exile can rescue hundreds.

    Anyone who wants to help Joseph is welcome to contact me, and we can arrange for help to be sent directly to him. His immediate need is for $100 AUS, which would see him get shelter into the New Year, plus an asthma inhaler.

    This blog ©2025 Geoff Allshorn. All rights hereby returned to the poet.
    I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

    World AIDS Day 2025

    Memory is not enough. Attention is not guaranteed. Justice must be demanded.

    World AIDS Day is not just a memorial. It is a challenge.

    This post is a challenge between the past and the present silence that endangers lives. It honours those lost, confronts ongoing injustice, and insists that we remember not only what happened, but what continues to unfold. From Melbourne to Kampala, from memory to moral action, our imperative to care must be honoured.


    Early badge from VAAC (Victorian AIDS Action Council – later VAC and now Thorne-Harbour Health)

    In a recent social media post, people were asked for their recollection of the 1980s and 1990s. Most of them happily recalled musicians or musical groups, movies, videotapes, the arrival of home computers, or generally reminisced about “the good old days” before the arrival of modern-day stresses.

    My recollections are somewhat different.

    The 1980s marked my arrival into young adulthood. Work. Freedom. Autonomy. Meeting others and developing my first extended family outside of my biological one (like Mary Anne Singleton and Mouse from “Tales of the City”). But the times also featured the insidious arrival of a terrible epidemic that started attacking and killing many of my friends.

    The next fifteen years were frantic, full of illnesses and deaths, of stigma and discrimination, of angst and activism. There were days and months full of pain and fear and people living in a double closet: homosexuality and HIV.

    Very few people nowadays seem to either know about (or recall) those days when a whole generation of young men (and others) was effectively decimated. How quickly we forget, especially because there are lessons we can learn a generation later. It seems the stigma of AIDS lingers a generation later.

    This is not just an academic exercise. I recently learnt of the death from HIV/AIDS of an African Facebook friend. The dangers and outcomes are still very real.

    Over forty years later, the virus still claims lives; not in the same neighbourhoods, perhaps, but in communities across Africa and Asia where silence and stigma persist. The difference now is not ignorance, but indifference. We know what works. We know what saves lives. And yet, we ignore.

    In Uganda and Kenya, millions live under laws and social norms that stigmatise or criminalize their existence: laws shaped not by local tradition, but by imported hate. In 2023, Uganda passed one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws, introducing the death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality.” These laws were seeded by decades of lobbying from U.S. evangelical groups, exporting their hate under the hypocritical guise of “pro-life” and “pro-family” agendas.

    The consequences are devastating: queer Ugandans are hunted, HIV-positive individuals fear seeking treatment, and human rights groups are silenced. In Kenya, similar pressures have led to rising violence and legal crackdowns. This is not just a moral failure, it’s a public health catastrophe. It’s part of a Third-World War.

    In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed the Rescissions Act, slashing $7.9 billion in foreign aid. PEPFAR was spared, but only narrowly. The broader rollback has disrupted HIV care in over 70,000 programs across 50 countries. A Lancet-backed study warns that nearly 500,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa could die from AIDS-related causes in the next five years if PEPFAR funding collapses.

    “Silence = Death.” — ACT UP
    “The opposite of forgetting is justice.” — Geoff Allshorn
    “We are not post-AIDS. We are post-attention.” — UNAIDS advocate

    World AIDS Day is not just a memorial. It is a challenge. If we forget the past, we risk repeating it; not in San Francisco or Sydney, but in Kampala, Nairobi, Dhaka. The virus is still here. So must we be.


    Related Posts from my Humanist blog:


    These posts remind us of memory, justice, and care, all worthy and noble considerations for World AIDS Day 2025.

    ©2025 Geoff Allshorn with editorial and layout assistance from Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.