Three gay organizations were granted consultative status by the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Dec. 11.

They are the Danish National Association for Gays and Lesbians, the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, and the European branch of the International Lesbian and Gay Association.

All three groups previously had been denied the status.

Consultative status allows organizations to access U.N. meetings, deliver oral and written reports, contact country representatives and organize events.

ECOSOC is composed of 54 member states. Twenty-four supported the German group and 23 voted for ILGA-Europe and the Danish association. Ten or 11 countries abstained in the individual votes on each group, giving the organizations a majority of the votes cast. Support came from several European nations and Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, South Korea and the United States. Costa Rica voted in favor of the German group only.

The worldwide ILGA organization, as opposed to its European branch, once had ECOSOC status, from 1993 to 1994, but was stripped of it following a scandal orchestrated by the U.S. right wing in which a small number of ILGA’s member organizations around the world were accused of not taking a strong enough stance against pedophilia. Gay groups have faced an uphill battle at the U.N. ever since.

Nearly 2,900 organizations have ECOSOC consultative status.

Nigerian lawmakers are expected to pass pending legislation that will ban nearly everything gay.

The measure outlaws belonging to a gay group, reading a gay book, watching a gay movie, visiting a gay Internet site and socializing by two or more gay people. For good measure, the bill also bans same-sex marriage.

Violating the proposed law would result in up to five years in prison.

Gay sex is already illegal. It is punished with death in Muslim areas of the nation and with jail time in Christian sections.

The Legislative Council of the state of South Australia passed a domestic-partner bill Dec. 8 granting registered same-sex couples all state-level rights of marriage. The vote was 16 to 3.

The measure had passed the lower House of Assembly earlier.

The partnerships also will be available to any two people who live together.

Five gay activists were abducted in Baghdad Nov. 9 and haven’t been heard from since, the British gay group OutRage! reported.

“The kidnapped men are Amjad, 27; Rafid, 29; Hassan, 24; Ayman, 19 and Ali, 21,” OutRage! said. “All were members of Iraq’s clandestine gay rights movement, Iraqi LGBT. … It is feared they may have been murdered by death squads operating under the cover of the Iraqi police.”

OutRage! said the Iraqi activists “had been documenting the killing of lesbians and gays, relaying details of homophobic executions to our office in London, and providing safe houses and support to queers fleeing the death squads.”

At the moment of their apparent disappearance, they were talking on the phone with OutRage! member Ali Hili.

“The five men were holding a secret meeting in a safe house in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad,” OutRage! said. “Suddenly there was a lot of noise, then the connection ended.”

Meanwhile, men’s clothing store owner Haydar Kamel, 35, “was kidnapped” five days later by “members of the Mahdi army, an Islamist militia loyal to fundamentalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr,” OutRage! said.

The group said Kamel had been providing financial support to gay men who were hiding after being threatened by death squads, and that he had received death threats himself.

Another recent incident took place at the Jar al-Qamar barber shop in the al-Karada district of Baghdad, OutRage! reported.

“It was popular with gay men, which is probably the reason it was targeted,” the group said. “All four employees were arrested and taken away by the Iraqi police. They have disappeared.

“It is feared that these 10 kidnapped men have been summarily executed.”

Hili called the disappearances “the latest ‘sexual cleansing’ operations mounted by extremist Islamist death squads, many of whom have infiltrated the Iraqi police.”

“They are systematically targeting gays and lesbians for extrajudicial execution, as part of their so-called moral purification campaign,” he said. “The aim of the death squads is the creation of a fundamentalist state.”

The editor of Turkey’s Kaos GL Magazine, Umut Güner, is facing criminal charges in Ankara regarding last summer’s issue of the magazine.

The issue critically analyzed the relationship between homosexuality and pornography via articles by noted writers Ahmet Tulgar, Fatih Özgüven, Güner Kuban, Hasan Bülent Kahraman, Mehmet Bilal Dede and Meltem Arikan.

Published since 1994 by the Kaos GL Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association, the magazine is Turkey’s only gay publication.

Güner is accused of publishing obscenity in violation of Penal Code Article 226, which allows punishment of up to three years in prison.

The full press run of the summer issue was confiscated by police on July 24. Ankara’s 12th Justice Court approved the seizure at the urging of the Public Prosecutor’s Press Crimes Investigation Bureau. The authorities took action for the “protection of general morality.”

The Supreme Court later upheld the lower court’s decision, which also was later backed by the Ankara First Instance Criminal Court.

Kaos GL plans to appeal the seizure and the criminal charges to the European Court of Human Rights.

Assistance: Bill Kelley