French Minister of Human Rights Rama Yade announced the Sarkozy government's decision to lead the effort for the international decriminalization of homosexuality. This year's observance of the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) on Sunday, May 17, was marked by key victories for the global campaign when it was officially endorsed by the governments of France, Cuba, and Costa Rica. (At Right: Louis-Georges Tin, president of the International Committee for IDAHO)

Significantly, France's minister of human rights, Rama Yade, convened a meeting with gay activists on Sunday to announce that France would push for "a European initiative calling for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality," according to a statement released by the minister afterward.

Yade said Paris would submit the initiative to the United Nations after it takes over the rotating six-month European Union presidency in July - during which time France will speak for all EU member states at the UN General Assembly, according to Agence France Presse.

The conservative French government's unprecedented action followed year-long negotiations with it led by Louis-Georges Tin, president of the International Committee for IDAHO, and the meeting with Minister Yade came just hours after a "die-in" at the Elysée Palace, the presidential headquarters and residence, in which Tin and a dozen other LGBT activists were arrested and briefly detained. The protestors at the die-in wore T-shirts with the names of some of the 86 countries in which, according to an International Lesbian and Gay Association study released earlier this year, homosexuality is still considered a crime.

The International Day Against Homophobia was the brainchild of Louis-Georges Tin, a remarkable young French university professor born in the overseas French department of Martinique. Tin is 33 and not only one of the most creative gay leaders internationally, he is also a rising star of France's emerging black activist community.

Tin specifically credited the gay conservatives: "The GayLib lobbied hard and well, their work was very effective, and we might well not have achieved the results we did without them."

When Tin launched the first IDAHO in 2005, he chose May 17 for the annual event because it was on that date in 1990 that the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases. Coincidently, on the same day in 2004, the same-sex marriage ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court took effect.

IDAHO's international campaign for a United Nations decriminalization resolution was launched in November 2006 with a petition campaign endorsed by five Nobel Prize winners, ten Pulitzer Prize winners, six Academy Award winners, and two former French prime ministers.

Other governments that previously endorsed IDAHO include the European Parliament, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and several provinces of Canada, Brazil, and Spain. The day is now observed in more than 60 countries worldwide.

The UK held the most extensive IDAHO observances this year. The Trades Union Congress, the Communications Workers, and other large British unions joined in, and the effort was even endorsed by the UK Football Association, which included an article about homophobia in its program for the FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium.

"Football has already waged a positive war on racism in the game and the FA are now hoping that a similar campaign to ban homophobic behavior from grounds across the country will also make its mark," the article read.

The US, however, remained one of the world's few democracies in which leading LGBT groups failed to organize even one single public IDAHO event.