UN Security Council meets on IS violence against LGBTs

The UN Security Council on Monday met behind closed doors to hear accounts of violence inflicted against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people by the Islamic State -- also known as ISIS or ISIL -- in a first meeting of its kind for the 15-nation council.

"Until today the Security Council had never broached this subject, so today represents a small but historic step," Samantha Power, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, told reporters here after the closed-door meeting.

Power said the meeting was closed to cameras and journalists because of security concerns for one of the witnesses who spoke at the meeting.

Subhi Nahas, a Syrian refugee and advocate for the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration who also spoke at the meeting, later told journalists about his own experience, escaping violence in Syria. He said he still receives death threats even after he had fled Syria.

"In Turkey, my life was threatened again by ISIL so I had to go to the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) and ask them to give me refugee status," he said.

Jessica Stern, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, told journalists that at least 30 people have been killed by the Islamic State for alleged crimes relating to their sexuality.

"The context that we know today is that the minimum number of executions for which ISIS has claimed responsibility for sodomy is 30," said Stern, adding that "ISIS established courts that claim to punish sodomy with stoning, firing squads, beheadings and by pushing men off of tall buildings."

Stern said the issue of LGBT rights was important for the UN Security Council -- which focuses on issues of international peace and security -- to consider because LGBT people do not experience wars in the same ways as other people.

"The particularities of how LGBTI (LGBT and intersex) people experience conflict is a sorely neglected issue and that frightens me because people don't experience war in all the same ways," she said.

The Arria-formula meeting titled Vulnerable Groups in Conflict: ISIL's Targeting of LGBT Individuals was convened by the permanent missions of the United States and Chile to the United Nations. Thirteen of the security council's 15 members, including China and Russia, attended the meeting, said Stern.

Arria-formula meetings are very informal, confidential gatherings which allow UN security council members to exchange views frankly with other council members and invited persons.

The "Arria-formula meetings" are a relatively recent practice of the members of the Security Council. Like the informal consultations of the whole of the Security Council, they are not envisaged in the Charter of the United Nations or the Security Council's provisional rules of procedure.

Under Article 30 of the UN Charter, however, the Council is the master of its own procedure and has the latitude to determine its own practices. Endite