Rewriting The Narrative: Malawi Celebrates Historic Pride Parade
The annual Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk was established in 2005 to honour the work of HRDs who are courageously making outstanding contributions to the promotion and protection of the human rights of others, often at great personal risk to themselves.
Eric Sambisa is a human rights defender from Malawi who is a co-founder and currently the director of NYASA Rainbow Alliance (NRA). NRA is an LGBT+ led membership organisation with approximately 300 members working with and for the LGBT+ community. Based in Blantyre in Southern Malawi, the NRA was established in 2014 to increase the scope of the existing LGBT+ organisational landscape and address some of the gaps identified by the members of the LGBT+ community themselves. In December 2015, Eric made the brave
decision to be the first Malawian to openly come out as gay on national television.
While criminal proceedings have rarely been enforced in post-colonial Malawi, same-sex
relations between consensual adults remain criminalised, exposing gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender and other identifying people to routine violence, discrimination and stigma in almost all
aspects of their daily lives.
