Why this work matters
For most of the last twenty years, the global picture for LGBTQI+ people improved, slowly and unevenly. Countries decriminalized. Marriage rights spread. In many places, the law bent towards dignity.
Lately, that arc has stopped bending the way it should.
As of late 2025, around 65 countries still criminalize private, consensual same-sex relationships between adults. As many as twelve countries — Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates, Uganda, and Yemen — allow the death penalty as a possible punishment, and at least seven actively prosecute under it. In 41 of these countries, the laws apply equally to women. The criminalizing line runs through 32 countries in Africa, much of the Middle East, parts of South and Southeast Asia, and a handful of nations in the Caribbean and Oceania.
Those numbers tell part of the story. The rest of it is even less heartening.
The last three years have not gone the right way
In May 2023, Uganda passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act — one of the most punitive anti-LGBTQI+ laws in the world. It introduced life imprisonment for “homosexuality” and the death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality.” Uganda’s Constitutional Court upheld the core of the law in April 2024. Human Rights Watch’s two-year retrospective, published in May 2025, documented widespread arrests, entrapment through dating apps, extortion, evictions, and a sustained climate of fear directly attributable to the legislation.
Uganda has not been alone.
Mali introduced a new penal code criminalizing same-sex relationships in December 2024 — a country that previously had no such law.
Trinidad and Tobago’s Court of Appeal reinstated colonial-era buggery laws in March 2025, reversing a 2018 ruling that had decriminalized them.
Burkina Faso adopted a new anti-gay law in September 2025.
Ghana’s parliament revived its sweeping Human Sexual Rights and Family Values bill in early 2026.
Russia, after designating the “international LGBT movement” extremist in November 2023, expanded prosecutions through 2024 and 2025 and added the Russian LGBT Network itself to the extremist list in April 2026. By the end of 2025, Russian courts had opened at least 23 criminal cases on these grounds. Possession of a rainbow flag, attending a private gathering, or even searching for LGBTQ content online can now bring criminal charges.
For every recent decriminalization — St. Lucia in 2025, Dominica in 2024, Namibia in 2024, Mauritius in 2023 — there has been an escalation elsewhere, often with broader reach and harsher penalties.
The escape routes have narrowed
Fleeing persecution has always been hard for LGBTQI+ people. Most refugees first land in a neighbouring country, and many of the countries bordering those with anti-LGBTQI+ laws have anti-LGBTQI+ laws of their own. A gay man fleeing Uganda often lands in Kenya, where same-sex relations remain criminalized. Living in transit is rarely living in safety.
What has changed is the further step — resettlement to a country that will offer durable protection. UNHCR estimates that around 37 of the world’s 193 UN member states formally recognize sexual orientation and gender identity as legitimate grounds for asylum, and the actual resettlement capacity through those routes is much smaller.
In January 2025, the United States suspended its refugee admissions program by executive order. Through 2025 and into 2026 the program remained largely paused, with court challenges ongoing and only narrow case-by-case exceptions in operation. The United States has historically been one of the largest resettlement countries in the world. Its withdrawal does not just remove a door — it shifts the weight onto every other country that still has one open.
Canada is one of those countries. So are the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands. None of them, alone, can absorb the gap. But, amidst mounting political pressures, Canada and many of the remaining countries that still resettle LGBTQI+ refugees have reduced staffing and refugee quotas, resulting in long processing delays.
What this means in practice
An LGBTQI+ person fleeing persecution in 2026 faces a longer wait, a more dangerous transit, and a smaller chance of reaching a country where their identity will be recognized and protected. Many wait in refugee camps or safe houses in hiding, with no documents (or falsified ones) for years.
UNHCR’s most recent figures count 117.3 million people forcibly displaced worldwide (not only LGBTQ+ people). In the first half of 2025, only 28,600 of them were resettled through any sponsorship or resettlement route. Against numbers like those, an individual sponsorship can look small. It is not small for the person it reaches.
Why Nanaimo, and why now
Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program is unusual in the world. It lets groups of ordinary people — friends, neighbours, congregants, colleagues — take legal and financial responsibility for resettling a refugee and walk with them through their first year here.
ROAR has worked through this program for ten years, with a deliberate focus on LGBTQI+ refugees and a base on Vancouver Island. What this community has built is small in global terms but significant in human ones: a place where a person who has spent years hiding can stop hiding. A place where a sponsorship group meets them at the airport. A place where they can rent an apartment, find work, see a doctor, and walk down the street holding their partner’s hand without calculating the risk of doing so.
The conditions in 2026 are harder than they were when ROAR began. The numbers globally are worse. The exit routes are narrower. The need is not abstract — there are specific people, right now, waiting for a sponsorship group to take them on.
What you can do
You don’t need to be LGBTQI+ to help. You don’t need to live in Nanaimo. You don’t need a lot of money.
Donate. Sponsorship costs are real and ongoing. Monthly gifts, even small ones, are what make sponsorship groups viable.
Start, or join, a sponsorship group. We can walk you through what’s involved. It is more doable than it looks, and it is the most concrete thing one community can do for another.
Subscribe to the newsletter. Stay close to the work.
Sources and further reading
Human Dignity Trust, Map of Jurisdictions that Criminalise LGBT People — humandignitytrust.org
ILGA World, State-Sponsored Homophobia annual report — ilga.org
76crimes.com — current tracker of anti-LGBTI laws
Human Rights Watch, “They’re Putting Our Lives at Risk”: How Uganda’s Anti-LGBT Climate Unleashes Abuse (May 2025) — hrw.org
Amnesty International, Russia: Russian LGBT Network labelled “extremist” in escalating crackdown (April 2026) — amnesty.org
UNHCR, Mid-Year Trends 2025 (November 2025) — unhcr.org
Immigration Equality, Trapped in Danger: Trump Administration Policies (June 2025) — immigrationequality.org
