by Guest

contribution by Natacha Kennedy

Tomorrow, Monday 10 Sept, a very rare thing is happening: A demonstration at 5.30 outside the Danish Embassy in London.

Fernanda Milan is a young woman of 22, she is intelligent, bubbly and stylish. Yet in a week’s time the Danish government will be sending her to her death. Her crime; being transgender. Fernanda is Guatemalan and used to work as spokeswoman for a group called OASIS, which campaigns for human rights of trans people in Guatemala.

As a trans person who has actively campaigned for rights which ordinary people in Europe take for granted, Fernanda became a target for these vigilante groups and elements of the police, which is why she fled to Denmark.

Some people have suggested that, if she does get deported she will probably not even get out of Guatemala airport alive, and even if she does it will only be a matter of time before she is hunted down and killed.

Figures are difficult to come by but by pulling together information from different sources it appears that probably around 60 trans people have been murdered in Guatemala in the last decade, and dozens more have simply “disappeared”. For a country of only 13 million people this makes it one of the places where trans people are most likely to be killed.

It has been estimated that the average life expectancy of a transgender person in Guatemala is 25, and there are, quite simply, no trans people there at all over 35. Trans people are excluded from society and have no access to education or employment, most being forced into sex work to survive, where they become easy targets for extra-judicial killings.

The problem for Fernanda is that Denmark, the UK and Ireland opted out of an EU agreement to include persecution on the grounds of gender identity as a criterion for asylum.

Yet Denmark has an additional obligation to Fernanda: While she was in a Red Cross asylum camp in Sandholm in Jutland, she as placed in a male dormitory. As a result of this she was gang-raped and fled the camp ending up being forced to work in a brothel. When, eventually, she was interviewed by the police (about her asylum application, she has never been interviewed about the rapes) the police officer effectively told her it was her fault that she got raped.

The Danish government has the chance to save the life of a young woman who, if they fail to act, will shortly no longer be with us.

Save Fernanda Milan Demonstration outside the Royal Danish Embassy,

55 Sloane Street,

London SW1X 9SR.

Monday 10 September 5.30 – 8.00pm.

The Facebook demo page