Fridae

About 70 gay rights activists staged a sit-in at Seoul City Hall this past weekend to protest against the city government's decision to back out of a previously stated plan to establish a charter for the protection of gay rights.

Members of Rainbow Action (a Korean LGBT group) hung a banner on Saturday morning and began their weekend-long sit in. The banner read: "To sexual minorities, human rights mean life."

The protesters demanded that Mayor Park Won-soon reverse his decision to shelve the charter and apologise for his attitude towards LGBT.

The sit-in was direct action in response to the Seoul Metropolitan Government halting the finalisation of the Charter of Human Rights for Seoul Citizens due to protests from gay rights opponents.

The sit-in comes six days after the Seoul Metropolitan Government halted finalizing the Charter of Human Rights for Seoul Citizens, which it had initially planned to proclaim on Dec. 10 — World Human Rights Day — because of protests from gay rights opponents. 

The charter had a clause which read, ”the right not to be discriminated against based on sexual orientation or sexual identity."

"Seoul City and Park have degraded the rights of sexual minorities into an issue that can be ‘agreed with' or ‘opposed,'" said an activist on Sunday,  who also criticized the human rights lawyer-turned-mayor for "submitting" to Christian groups that oppose gay rights, according to the Korea Times.

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