As world dignitaries put together to attend the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Canada subsequent week, advocates are calling on prime authorities officers to meaningfully advance LGBTQ2S+ rights.
Pride7 is an affinity group made up of impartial, non-governmental people that work to create coverage suggestions that promote and defend the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals amongst G7 member states.
Final month, the group partnered with two Canadian civil rights organizations – Egale Canada and the Dignity Community Canada – to host its personal summit in Ottawa. The occasion introduced collectively greater than 100 world LGBTQ+ leaders and advocates to the nation’s capital, the place they strategized and developed coverage suggestions for G7 officers.
“Members underscored the pressing want for intersectional approaches to handle world challenges and referred to as on G7 governments to steer by instance in defending the human rights and dignity of LGBTQIA+ individuals,” representatives from Pride7 stated in a press launch.
“G7 commitments to democracy, human rights, and sustainable improvement can’t be fulfilled with out addressing the systemic boundaries and violence confronted by LGBTQIA+ communities,” the group added.
Liberal MP Rob Oliphant delivers remarks on the 2025 Pride7 Summit in Ottawa, Ontario.
The coverage suggestions – known as the Pride7 2025 press launch – focuses on 4 core themes, akin to upholding democracy, strengthening authorized frameworks and advancing human rights protections.
Advocates are additionally pushing for financial sustainability, humanitarian motion, local weather resilience, gender justice and well being fairness.
“Even on the earth’s most superior economies, 2SLGBTQI rights are beneath risk,” stated Helen Kennedy, government director of Egale Canada. “Rising hate, disinformation, and coverage rollbacks present that progress just isn’t assured. G7 leaders should take this severely – by listening to LGBTQIA+ voices, adopting the Pride7 Communiqué, and recognizing Pride7 as an official a part of the G7 course of.”
Pride7 was launched in Japan as an affinity group on the G7 Leaders’ Summit in 2023. Since then, organizers have been calling on world leaders to acknowledge them as an official civil society engagement group.
“Recognizing Pride7 as an official engagement group just isn’t symbolic — it’s a obligatory step towards guaranteeing that the views, experience, and lived realities of LGBTQIA+ individuals inform world decision-making on the highest degree,” the group stated. “Simply as Women7, Civil7, and Youth7 are consulted and included in G7 processes, so too should LGBTQIA+ voices be heard and meaningfully engaged.”
When world leaders collect in Kananaskis, Alberta subsequent week, it’ll mark 50 years for the reason that first G7 summit, which occurred in Rambouillet, France in 1975. June can be formally acknowledged as Satisfaction Month throughout Canada.
Pride7 is presently gathering endorsements of its 2025 communiqué, which it intends to current to the Authorities of Canada and different G7 leaders at subsequent week’s summit.
“As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the primary G7 Summit, Pride7 reminds G7 leaders that tens of millions of individuals around the globe — in G7 international locations and past — proceed to face persecution for who they’re,” the group stated.
