Queer European Asylum

COVID-19 & Queer Asylum is a virtual symposium featuring NGO representatives and lawyers working on queer asylum, LGBTQI+ activists and LGBTQI+ persons seeking asylum/refugees from Germany. The Symposium consists of three panels followed by a counseling forum lead by lawyers and LGBTQI+ asylum practitioners that allows for a Q&A around COVID-19 and LGBTQI+ asylum.

This symposium is intended to provide a platform for discussing the manner in which such pandemic and its political responses affects a set of people who remain by and large invisible in discussions on COVID-19. While the current coronavirus pandemic increases the uncertainty about the future for most refugees, LGBTQI+ persons on the move are hit particularly hard. For LGBTQI+ refugees in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, the extreme social isolation and the reliving of certain trauma as experienced in unsafe environments could cost them their mental and economic stability.

The symposium will explore such questions as: How does the COVID-19 crisis exacerbate isolation for LGBTQI+ refugees? How does such pandemic re-trigger trauma and affect the mental health of LGBTQI+ refugees? To what extent is access to community and health services compromised? How does COVID-19 strenthen solidarity and community? How do postponed asylum decisions and hearings affect LGBTQI+ persons everyday life? How does the lack of hygiene in cramped asylum camps particularly affect those with autoimmune deficiencies?

Register here!