Some of the gravest abuses in the world today meet, in the West, with silence - not because they are unknown, but because of where they happen and who commits them. No Excuse for Oppression addresses that silence. A right denied is denied whether the victim lives in Riyadh or Rotterdam, and the obligation to say so does not lapse because the perpetrator is geopolitically inconvenient to name.
The pattern
Many of the Western institutions that exist to defend human rights - universities, large NGOs, much of the press - apply their attention unevenly. Abuses inside Western societies are named quickly and at volume. The same abuses, or worse, committed in the developing world draw a quieter response, a hedged one, or none. The oppression of women and the murder of women by their own families for "honour"; the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities; the imprisonment and execution of gay people; forced labour and modern slavery - when these occur outside the West, they are too often treated as matters of culture to be understood rather than wrongs to be opposed.
The scale
The unevenness is not explained by the facts. For the abuses in question, prevalence runs heavily outside the West.
- Sexual minorities. As of 2025, sixty-four states criminalise consensual same-sex relations, and seven prescribe the death penalty for them, with a handful more where the law is uncertain. These states are concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Every country in Europe has decriminalised.
- Women and girls. More than 230 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation - 144 million in Africa, 80 million in Asia, 6 million in the Middle East. An estimated 4.4 million girls are at risk in a single year, and in much of the practising world most are cut before the age of five.
- Honour killings. The most-cited estimate, from the UN Population Fund, puts the number of women and girls murdered each year by relatives in the name of family honour at around 5,000. That figure dates from 2000, is widely treated as an undercount, and some organisations put it as high as 20,000. The killings cluster in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and in diaspora communities from those regions. They sit within a larger pattern: the UN recorded some 50,000 women and girls killed by relatives or partners in 2024, the highest absolute numbers falling in Africa and Asia.
These are the places where the silence is loudest. They are also the places where the numbers are largest. The mismatch between the two is the subject of this program.
The rationalisation
The usual defence of the silence is respect for other cultures - a reluctance, rooted in the West's colonial history, to impose its own standards on societies it once dominated. The caution is reasonable. The conclusion drawn from it is not.
Cultural relativism, applied to these cases, produces a perverse result: the people already worst-treated are denied the protection extended to everyone else, and they are denied it in the name of sensitivity. When an honour killing is reported first as a custom and only second as a murder, the framing has already taken a side. The position also rests on a factual error. Universal human rights are not a Western possession. The people resisting these abuses across the global South - the women campaigning against forced marriage, the lawyers defending the accused, the activists risking prison - are overwhelmingly from within the societies in question, and they are asking for solidarity, not silence. To treat a woman in one country as less entitled to bodily safety than a woman in another is not respect. It is a double standard, which is the very thing the caution claims to avoid.
Why it matters now
The world's population is shifting toward the regions where these abuses are most common. A human rights movement that averts its eyes from the non-Western world is, with each passing decade, averting its eyes from a larger share of the people it exists to defend. The selective gaze does not merely leave some victims uncovered today; it points the movement away from where most of the need will be tomorrow.
How the program works
No Excuse for Oppression is a documentation and advocacy program.
- Documentation. Setting down the record - prevalence, laws, and cases - for the abuses that the selective gaze passes over, with sources, so the scale is plain.
- Platform. Carrying on Meridian 21 the voices of those resisting these abuses from inside the societies where they occur.
- Engagement. Putting that record to the institutions that practise the silence - the universities, NGOs, and media outlets - and to the public and decision-makers who can press for a single standard.
Where we stand
Libera Mondo is strictly non-partisan and apolitical, and this program is not a claim that any culture is inferior to another. It is the opposite: that every person, in every society, holds the same rights, and that no person's suffering should count for less because of where they were born or who is responsible. We apply one standard everywhere. We let the record make the case.
A voice for the forgotten.