Online Symposium: COVID-19 and Queer Asylum

COVID-19 & Queer Asylum is a virtual symposium featuring NGO representatives and lawyers working on queer asylum, LGBTQI+ activists and LGBTQI+ persons seeking asylum/refugees from Germany as well as the Council of Europe. The Symposium consists of three panels followed by a counseling forum lead by lawyers and LGBTQI+ asylum practitioners that allows for a Q&A around COVID-19 and LGBTQI+ asylum.

This symposium is intended to provide a platform for discussing the manner in which such pandemic and its political responses affects a set of people who remain by and large invisible in discussions on COVID-19. While the current coronavirus pandemic increases the uncertainty about the future for most refugees, LGBTQI+ persons on the move are hit particularly hard. For LGBTQI+ refugees in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, the extreme social isolation and the reliving of certain trauma as experienced in unsafe environments could cost them their mental and economic stability.