Version 1.0 · First published 14 June 2026 · Last updated 14 June 2026 · Published by Libera Mondo z.s., Prague

Facts current as of June 2026. This is a living document; substantive revisions are logged in the version history and the version number is incremented.

The world's gravest abuses against women, minorities, and the vulnerable meet, in much of the West, with a quiet that tracks where they happen and who commits them. The remedy is not less attention anywhere. It is one standard, applied everywhere.

In brief

This article documents a mismatch between where the world's gravest abuses against women, minorities, and the vulnerable occur and where they draw sustained attention: the abuses are concentrated outside the West; much of the West's human-rights attention is not. Sixty-five states criminalize consensual same-sex relations and seven prescribe death for them. More than 230 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation, with an estimated 4.5 million girls at risk in 2026 alone. The UN's most-cited estimate of killings "in the name of honour" is at least 5,000 a year, treated even by those who cite it as a floor. In 2024, some 50,000 women and girls were killed by partners or family members worldwide, the largest numbers in Africa and Asia. The article also examines the usual justification for the silence — cultural relativism — and finds it fails on its own terms: universal rights were shaped by non-Western drafters, the criminal laws most often defended as tradition were in much of the world inherited from European colonizers, and those resisting these abuses are overwhelmingly from within the societies in question. The conclusion is a single standard, applied everywhere.

In November 2025, the United Nations reported that a woman or girl was being killed by her own partner or a member of her own family roughly every ten minutes — about 50,000 in the year, the largest numbers in Africa and Asia.1 The finding moved through the Western press as a statistic and out again. It is worth asking what the response would have been had the same toll fallen, in the same proportions, on Stockholm and Toronto rather than on Lagos and Lahore.

This is the silence No Excuse for Oppression addresses. Some of the gravest abuses in the world today are met, in much of the West, not with ignorance — the facts are known and well documented — but with a hush that varies by where the abuse happens and who commits it. 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. 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 the protection extended to some should not be withheld from others in the name of respect.

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; the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities; the imprisonment and execution of gay people; forced labor — when these occur outside the West, they are too often treated as matters of culture to be understood rather than wrongs to be opposed.

There is a defense of this, and it is not empty. Some of the imbalance is proximity rather than malice: the press covers what is near, humanitarian organizations depend on operational access that authoritarian states can withdraw, and the institutions do cover these abuses, only less. Some of it is honest caution. But the gap is out of all proportion to the facts, and the facts are not in dispute. For the abuses in question, the weight falls heavily outside the West.

The scale

The unevenness of attention is not explained by the distribution of harm. The numbers run the other way.

Consider the criminalization of private life. As of 2026, sixty-five states still punish consensual same-sex relations, and seven prescribe death for them, with five more where the law leaves the possibility open. These states are clustered in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; every country in Europe has decriminalized.2 The trend is not simply slow. In the past year the count rose for the first time in almost a decade, after Burkina Faso criminalized for the first time and Trinidad and Tobago reversed a decriminalization.3

The harshest of the recent laws is Uganda's. Its Anti-Homosexuality Act, signed in 2023 and upheld by the country's constitutional court the following year, imposes life imprisonment for same-sex relations and death for what it calls "aggravated homosexuality."4 Frank Mugisha, the country's most prominent gay-rights advocate, has spent his career opposing it — and he rejects the premise that he is the one importing foreign values. "The oppression we are seeing now in Uganda is not Ugandan at all," he has said. The statute that first criminalized homosexuality there was written by British colonial administrators; the modern campaign to harden it, by his account and that of investigative reporting, has been backed by American religious organizations.5

He has the history on his side. More than half of the countries that criminalize same-sex relations today inherited the law from the British Empire — Section 377 of the 1861 Indian Penal Code and its descendants, exported across Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.6 Britain repealed those laws at home generations ago. The "tradition" invoked to defend criminalization is, across much of the world, a Victorian import that outlived the empire that brought it — and the people asking for it to end are the ones who live under it.

Consider female genital mutilation. More than 230 million women and girls alive today have undergone it — 144 million in Africa, 80 million in Asia, 6 million in the Middle East.7 In 2026 alone, an estimated 4.5 million girls are at risk, many of them before the age of five.8 "Female genital mutilation harms girls' bodies, dims their futures, and endangers their lives," the head of UNICEF, Catherine Russell, has said9 — a plain statement of fact that, elsewhere, is too often hedged. The practice is not only persisting; in places it is being made to look respectable. As of 2020, roughly one in four girls subjected to FGM were cut not by a traditional practitioner but by a doctor, nurse, or midwife — in Egypt and Sudan, nearly eight in ten.10 The World Health Organization warns that this "medicalization" lends the practice a false air of safety while inflicting the same lifelong harm, and risks legitimizing it rather than ending it; in February 2026, six UN agencies cautioned against exactly that argument — that the cutting is acceptable so long as a clinician performs it.11

Consider the murder of women by their own families for "honour." The most-cited figure, from the UN Population Fund, is about 5,000 such killings a year. It dates from 2000 and is treated, even by those who cite it, as a floor: the killings are underreported, disguised as suicides or accidents, and some organizations put the true number as high as 20,000.12 They cluster in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and in diaspora communities from those regions. They sit inside the larger pattern named at the start: the home is, for women, the most dangerous place.13

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 defense of the silence is respect — a reluctance, rooted in the West's colonial history, to impose its own standards on societies it once dominated. This caution has a serious pedigree, and it deserves to be stated at its strongest. When the United Nations drafted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s, the American Anthropological Association warned that a single charter risked imposing one civilization's values on all the others, and could become a vehicle for the same condescension — the "white man's burden" — that had long excused empire.14 The Declaration was written while most of Africa and Asia were still governed from European capitals. Suspicion of Western moral instruction is not paranoia. It is memory.

But the conclusion drawn from that history is wrong, and it is wrong on the facts. Universal human rights were not a Western dictation. The Declaration was shaped by non-Western hands: China's P. C. Chang, who pressed Confucian thought into its drafting; Lebanon's Charles Malik; and India's Hansa Mehta, who struck out the line "All men are born free and equal" and replaced it with "All human beings."15 A non-Western woman wrote the document's most famous sentence. The point cuts the other way, too: the very laws most often defended as ancestral tradition — the criminal statutes against homosexuality — were, across much of the world, drafted not in Kampala or Lahore but in London. And the people resisting these abuses today are not Western missionaries. They are overwhelmingly from within the societies in question — the women campaigning against forced marriage, the lawyers defending the accused, the survivors who will not be quiet.

Jaha Dukureh is one of them. Cut as an infant in The Gambia and married at fifteen, she returned years later to confront her own father and her community, and her campaign helped persuade the country to ban the practice in 2015. "When survivors speak," she has said, "you can't deny their story."16 She does not come, in her own words, as an outsider. Nor does the broader record support the idea that these practices are settled cultural consensus: roughly two-thirds of people in the countries where FGM is common now want it to end,17 and Pakistan, after the murder of Qandeel Baloch by her brother in 2016, closed the legal loophole that had let families forgive the killers in their own ranks.18

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. 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 — the very thing the caution claims to avoid.

Why it matters now

The argument is not only moral; it is demographic. The world's population is shifting toward the regions where these abuses are most common. According to the United Nations' 2024 projections, nearly all population growth between now and 2050 will occur in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia; nine countries will account for more than half of it, among them Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Egypt.19 A human rights movement that averts its eyes from the non-Western world is, with each passing decade, averting them 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.

Where we stand

One standard means one standard. These abuses are concentrated outside the West, but they are not absent from it: honour-based violence and FGM travel with diaspora communities, and the femicide figures count every region, the West included. The point is not that one civilization is crueler than another; it is that a woman's right to live in safety does not change with her postcode, and a person's right to love whom they choose does not stop at a border.

Libera Mondo is strictly non-partisan and apolitical. We hold that the same rights belong to every person, in every society, and that no one's suffering should count for less because of where they were born or who is responsible. We apply that standard everywhere, to everyone. We do not ask the world to pay less attention to anyone. We ask it to pay the same attention to all. We let the record make the case.

A voice for the forgotten.

Sources

  1. UNODC and UN Women, Femicides in 2024 (released 25 November 2025): ~50,000 women and girls killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024 (about 60 per cent of some 83,000 intentional killings of women and girls); roughly one every ten minutes; highest absolute numbers in Africa (22,600) and Asia (17,400); highest rate in Africa. — https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2025/11/every-day-137-women-and-girls-are-killed-by-intimate-partners-or-family-members Back to note
  2. ILGA World, Pride Month 2025 data: 64 states criminalized consensual same-sex relations as of May 2025; death penalty legally prescribed in 7, with no full legal certainty in 5 more; concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; all of Europe decriminalized. — https://ilga.org/news/pride-month-2025-lgbti-data-maps/ Back to note
  3. ILGA World, Pride Month 2026 data: the total rose to 65 — the first increase in almost a decade — after Burkina Faso criminalized for the first time and Trinidad and Tobago reversed its decriminalization. — https://ilga.org/news/pride-month-2026-lgbti-maps-data/ Back to note
  4. Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023 (signed May 2023; the Constitutional Court upheld its core provisions, including the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality," in April 2024 while striking a few narrower clauses): life imprisonment for same-sex relations and the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality." — https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/ugandas-controversial-anti-homosexuality-act-includes-possibility-of-death-sentence ; https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/ugandas-prominent-lgbtq-activist-says-newly-upheld-anti-gay-law-will-p-rcna146278 Back to note
  5. Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (interviews): the criminalization is a colonial inheritance, and — by his account and that of investigative reporting — the contemporary campaign has been backed by American religious organizations. — https://www.democracynow.org/2023/4/17/full_interview_frank_mugisha_on_new Back to note
  6. Human Dignity Trust; Human Rights Watch, This Alien Legacy (2008); FIDH: more than half of the countries that criminalize same-sex relations today inherited the law from British colonial rule (Section 377 of the 1861 Indian Penal Code and its descendants). England and Wales decriminalized in 1967. — https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/ ; https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/12/17/alien-legacy/origins-sodomy-laws-british-colonialism Back to note
  7. UNICEF, Female Genital Mutilation: A Global Concern (8 March 2024): more than 230 million survivors; 144 million in Africa, 80 million in Asia, 6 million in the Middle East. — https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/over-230-million-girls-and-women-alive-today-have-been-subjected-female-genital Back to note
  8. Joint statement by the Executive Directors of UNFPA and UNICEF and the heads of OHCHR, UN Women, WHO, and UNESCO, 6 February 2026: an estimated 4.5 million girls at risk in 2026, "many under the age of five" (Nigeria: about 86 per cent before age five, DHS 2018). — https://www.unfpa.org/press/over-four-million-girls-still-risk-female-genital-mutilation-un-leaders-call-sustained Back to note
  9. Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director, statement accompanying the 2024 FGM report. — https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147402 Back to note
  10. UNICEF (2020) and WHO (2025): around one in four FGM survivors (some 52 million as of 2020) were cut by health personnel; medicalization is far higher in Egypt and Sudan (roughly eight in ten) and rising among adolescents. — https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/approximately-1-4-fgm-survivors-were-cut-health-care-provider ; https://www.who.int/news/item/28-04-2025-who-issues-new-recommendations-to-end-the-rise-in--medicalized--female-genital-mutilation-and-support-survivors Back to note
  11. WHO guideline on the prevention of FGM and clinical management of complications (April 2025): medicalization gives a false impression of safety, can cause more severe harm, and risks legitimizing the practice; joint UN statement, 6 February 2026, warning against the argument that FGM is acceptable when performed by health workers. — https://www.who.int/news/item/05-02-2026-over-four-million-girls-still-at-risk-of-female-genital-mutilation--un-leaders-call-for-sustained-commitment-and-investment-to-end-fgm Back to note
  12. UNFPA, State of World Population 2000: at least 5,000 honour killings annually, widely treated as an undercount. Higher NGO estimates up to 20,000 are cited in the academic literature (D'Lima, Solotaroff and Pande, 2020). — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2455632719880852 Back to note
  13. UNODC and UN Women, Femicides in 2024 (as above): the majority of female homicide victims are killed by partners or family; the home is the most dangerous place for women in terms of lethal violence. Back to note
  14. American Anthropological Association, Statement on Human Rights (1947), authored by Melville Herskovits, cautioning that a universal declaration risked encoding one civilization's values and serving imperial ends; invoking the "white man's burden." — https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/human-rights Back to note
  15. On the non-Western drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): P. C. Chang (China), Charles Malik (Lebanon, who introduced Article 28), and Hansa Mehta (India), credited with changing "All men are born free and equal" to "All human beings are born free and equal." — https://www.un.org/en/about-us/udhr ; https://polsci.institute/political-theory-concepts-debates/are-human-rights-truly-universal/ Back to note
  16. Jaha Dukureh, Gambian FGM survivor and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador for Africa; her campaigning contributed to The Gambia's 2015 ban on FGM. — https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2018/3/in-the-words-of-jaha-dukureh ; https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/2/6/jaha-dukureh-dont-sensationalise-fgm-survivors Back to note
  17. UNFPA/UNICEF: roughly two-thirds of people in countries where FGM is prevalent express support for ending the practice. — https://www.unfpa.org/female-genital-mutilation Back to note
  18. Pakistan's Anti-Honour Killings Laws (Criminal Amendment) Act, 2016, closing the "forgiveness" loophole, passed after the murder of Qandeel Baloch. — https://www.weforum.org/stories/2016/07/honour-killings-pakistan-qandeel-baloch/ Back to note
  19. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects 2024: nearly all global population growth to 2050 will occur in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia; nine countries — including Nigeria, Pakistan, the DRC, Ethiopia, and Egypt — will account for more than half of it; sub-Saharan Africa's population is projected to roughly double. — https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population ; https://population.un.org/wpp/ Back to note

Version history

v1.0 — 14 June 2026. First published. Establishes the mismatch between where the gravest abuses against women, minorities, and the vulnerable occur and where they draw attention, across four pillars (criminalization of same-sex relations, FGM, honour killings, within the larger femicide pattern); puts the cultural-relativism defense at full strength and answers it from the history of the Universal Declaration and the colonial origins of anti-gay laws; and carries named testimony from within the societies in question. Drafting, expansion, and the correction passes preceded this publication. Live figures (criminalization count; FGM survivors and at-risk total; honour-killing and femicide estimates) verified current as of June 2026.

Future revisions are recorded here. The live figures above are the expected update points; when one changes, the relevant passage and source are updated, the date and version are incremented, and the change is noted in one line.

The Geography of Silence · No Excuse for Oppression · Version 1.0 · Libera Mondo z.s.