OII Europe welcomes Central Asia and the Maghreb Region to its scope of work!
During the OII Europe General Assembly held on March 17th, 2024 OII Europe’s membership approved a statutes change that will add Central Asia and the Maghreb Region to the scope of OII Europe’s work. This decision is a new step in the work that OII Europe has started with both regions a few years ago and we are more than thrilled that intersex activists and organisations from those regions have agreed to become part of the regional scope of OII Europe.
In the association’s statutes as registered in 2016, the scope of OII Europe’s work was limited to Europe, to mirror the fact that at that time no intersex person from Central Asia had reached out to the back then very small European Intersex Community. In the past years, this has changed. Expanding the scope of OII Europe’s activities to include Central Asia, will allow to cater for this changed reality. In addition, the inclusion of Central Asia will bring OII Europe in line with the other umbrella organisations working on European level like ILGA-Europe, IGLYO and TGEU who also include Central Asia in their scope of work for historical reasons upon request of the Central Asian Community (Ex-Soviet Russian speaking countries).
Since 2020 OII Europe has been in touch and has been supporting the intersex-led organisation Intersex Tunisia in its work. Intersex Tunisia is advocating not only in Tunisia but, through its output, in the whole Maghreb region, to make up for the complete lack of visibility of intersex people and intersex advocacy in the other Maghreb countries until very recently. Due to the mutual Arabic language base, resources and outreach can work cross-country. The geographical position of the Maghreb region in the Mediterranean, its languages (Arabic & French) and as well as centuries of history (including, but not limited to French colonialisation) have created strong links to Europe and, at the same time, classically leaves the region behind in regards to collaborations within international human rights activism. Including the Maghreb region into the scope of OII Europe, will allow OII Europe to strengthen intersex advocacy in the Maghreb region as well as in the Mediterranean region as a geographical area with its own cultural and historical dependencies.
