As international dignitaries put together to attend the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Canada subsequent week, advocates are calling on high authorities officers to meaningfully advance LGBTQ2S+ rights.
Pride7 is an affinity group made up of impartial, non-governmental people that work to create coverage suggestions that promote and defend the rights of LGBTQ+ folks amongst G7 member states.
Final month, the group partnered with two Canadian civil rights organizations – Egale Canada and the Dignity Community Canada – to host its personal summit in Ottawa. The occasion introduced collectively greater than 100 international LGBTQ+ leaders and advocates to the nation’s capital, the place they strategized and developed coverage suggestions for G7 officers.
“Contributors underscored the pressing want for intersectional approaches to deal with international challenges and known as on G7 governments to guide by instance in defending the human rights and dignity of LGBTQIA+ folks,” representatives from Pride7 stated in a press launch.
“G7 commitments to democracy, human rights, and sustainable improvement can’t be fulfilled with out addressing the systemic limitations and violence confronted by LGBTQIA+ communities,” the group added.
The coverage suggestions – known as the Pride7 2025 Communiqué – focuses on 4 core themes, resembling upholding democracy, strengthening authorized frameworks and advancing human rights protections.
Advocates are additionally pushing for financial sustainability, humanitarian motion, local weather resilience, gender justice and well being fairness.
“Even on the planet’s most superior economies, 2SLGBTQI rights are beneath menace,” stated Helen Kennedy, government director of Egale Canada. “Rising hate, disinformation, and coverage rollbacks present that progress is just not assured. G7 leaders should take this critically – by listening to LGBTQIA+ voices, adopting the Pride7 Communiqué, and recognizing Pride7 as an official a part of the G7 course of.”
Pride7 was launched in Japan as an affinity group on the G7 Leaders’ Summit in 2023. Since then, organizers have been calling on world leaders to acknowledge them as an official civil society engagement group.
“Recognizing Pride7 as an official engagement group is just not symbolic — it’s a obligatory step towards making certain that the views, experience, and lived realities of LGBTQIA+ folks inform international decision-making on the highest stage,” the group stated. “Simply as Women7, Civil7, and Youth7 are consulted and included in G7 processes, so too should LGBTQIA+ voices be heard and meaningfully engaged.”
When world leaders collect in Kananaskis, Alberta subsequent week, it’ll mark 50 years because the first G7 summit, which passed off in Rambouillet, France in 1975. June can also be formally acknowledged as Satisfaction Month throughout Canada.
Pride7 is presently accumulating endorsements of its 2025 communiqué, which it intends to current to the Authorities of Canada and different G7 leaders at subsequent week’s summit.
“As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the primary G7 Summit, Pride7 reminds G7 leaders that hundreds of thousands of individuals all over the world — in G7 international locations and past — proceed to face persecution for who they’re,” the group stated.
