For Immediate Release: May 16, 2003

SAN FRANCISCO - Scott Long, Program Director for the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), has announced his resignation. Long has been employed with IGLHRC since 1997 and has been affiliated with IGLHRC since the early 1990s.

During Long's tenure IGLHRC saw unprecedented successes at the United Nations where human rights violations against LGBT people are squarely on the agenda of world leaders. This past year alone, Long's work with the United Nations resulted in the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issuing an Opinion condemning detentions based on sexual orientation, the first time this has occurred. Long is also credited for his advocacy on behalf of the Cairo 52 in which 52 Egyptian men were arrested in May 2001 and were tortured in detention, and jailed continuously until their trial. In addition, under Long's leadership as Program Director, IGLHRC expanded its work with LGBT grassroots activists in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Long has been a longtime human rights activist. Beginning in the early 1990s, while living in the former Soviet bloc, he gathered detailed information on Romania's mistreatment of gays and lesbians, and led over forty missions to Romanian penitentiaries, reporting extensively on conditions there. He has worked closely with many LGBT groups in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, as well as with human rights groups including the Romanian Helsinki Committee. In 1993, he conducted the first fact-finding mission on the situation of gays and lesbians in Albania. He is the author, among other articles and reports, of Public Scandals: Sexual Orientation and Criminal Law in Romania, co-published by IGLHRC and Human Rights Watch, and has edited and contributed to recent reports on gay and lesbian parenting, and on the use of sexuality to target women's and feminist organizing worldwide. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University; he has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Budapest, and for two years was a Senior Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Daniel Lee, IGLHRC's Senior Program Officer for Asia and the Pacific will serve as Interim Program Director while IGLHRC opens and conducts a search for a new Program Director.