Melanie Nathan

Melanie Nathan is a South African-born attorney, mediator, equality activist and human rights advocate. She immigrated to the United States in 1985 and is the Executive Director of the African Human Rights Coalition. She publishes the advocacy blog O-Blog-Dee-O-Blog-Da and serves as a country-conditions expert witness for LGBTQI+ asylum seekers from African countries. Quotes “I came here in the mid-1980s from apartheid South Africa, leaving behind my twenties and hoping for a place where law and justice might finally occupy the same room. I had been a young, rookie attorney in Johannesburg, trying to make sense of an insanity that no law school could prepare anyone for. I found myself handling a death sentence case, the final tip to my fast-tilting world. Others had declined to take it on. I couldn’t. … Day after day I witnessed a legal system capable of extraordinary precision while administering extraordinary injustice. I confronted the impossible contradiction of a country where the rule of law existed, yet justice often did not. That case was the last straw for a young lawyer who simply could not reconcile the two, so I left.” O-Blog-Dee-O-Blog-Da “As the ED of African Human Rights Coalition, I provide country conditions witness expert testimony in the U.S. and global courts for asylum seekers from 20 countries to your north. Here are some of the harms, happening on your watch, that we testify to under oath, here in the U.S.A.: Violence that includes, beatings, so called ‘corrective’ rape of lesbians, sexual torture of men and women, disappearances, kidnappings, blackmail, discredited and dangerous reparative therapies, application of stoning under Sharia law, blackmail, banishment, firing, evictions, police brutality, forced anal exams, forced marriages, expulsions, and killings.” O-Blog-Dee-O-Blog-Da “To people who are offended by me using words like ‘escaping’ Africa, those are not my words. Those are the words of the people who have asked me to help them. To those who characterise me as a would-be ‘white saviour’: I have never seen myself as such and if they see me as such that speaks to their own racist issues. I have no such issues. I see myself as a member of the global LGBT minority with a strong duty to step up to the plate, and a huge obligation to act in ways that I best know how.” MambaOnline “When I was in my early twenties I realized that I was a lesbian. I tried marriage to a man, but I was very unhappy because I was not attracted to him. … When I truly fell in love, it was later in life and it was with a woman. … I was a lawyer during the Apartheid years in South Africa and worked hard to help my fellow oppressed Africans. I am a person who has only done good with my life. I have never hurt anyone or stolen anything. I have no desire to influence other people to be gay or lesbian because I understand that it is simply not possible to do that and what would I gain from it? I was born gay, I tried to change my sexual orientation, but because it is God given to me, that was not possible.” O-Blog-Dee-O-Blog-Da External links Category:South African women Category:LGBT rights activists Category:Human rights activists Category:South African lawyers Category:Living people