Pride Month: Plight of LGBTQ+ refugees in Sweden highlighted in new billboard campaign
LGBTQ+ if you’ve had to hide it your whole life?A new campaign by West Pride, an annual event held in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, aims to highlight the problems posed by this very question.“Letting an arbitrary process decide if LGBTQ+ refugees are approved asylum or not is inhumane,” says Emma Gunterberg Sachs, General Manager of West Pride.West Pride have teamed up with design company AKQA to create a billboard and social media campaign which highlights the plight of LGBTQ+ refugees caught up in the Swedish immigration system.Each billboard will feature an anonymous refugee and share their story, telling the journeys of six asylum seekers this Pride Month.“Far too many are wrongly sent back to a lifetime of persecution, imprisonment or death.
We need to stop this now,” says Gunterberg Sachs.When the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights did a report on LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in 2017, no member state was able to provide official figures on the numbers entering the country.Nations that could provide estimates did so through civil organisations with the Netherlands estimating between 100 -1000 and Denmark given 70.There have been widespread reports of LGBTQ+ refugees from the Middle East and West Africa reaching Europe in the hopes of a better life, only to be asked for proof of their sexuality in the tolerant countries they are going to for sanctuary.
