Tiumen, Siberia, 2008: the head of Rainbow House, an organization campaigning for LGBT rights, is put through the wringer under the Law to Combat Extremism. The organization had been repeatedly denied registration (which means they couldn’t even open a bank account). Why? Because the authorities felt that reducing the population of the Russian Federation was one of its aims and this was a threat to national security.
When 9 children (aged between 12 and 17) of the Diyarbakir Yenişehir Municipality Children’s Choir sang their hearts out at the San Francisco World Music Festival in 2007, little did they know that they were transgressing Article 7/2 of Turkey’s Anti-Terrorism Law. How? They had performed a Kurdish anthem. No matter that they had sung in nine different languages and included a Turkish patriotic song in their performance. The charges were dropped at their trials, but an arrest warrant remained active for the choir leader Duygu Özge Bayar, who stayed behind in the US to study English.
