Tatchell to Give Amnesty International Lecture

Never a stranger to controversy, human rights activist Peter Tatchell will give this year’s Amnesty International lecture in Belfast at a time when homophobia is high on the news agenda in the North, writes Fionola Meredith

How exactly did the public perception of Peter Tatchell shift from “homosexual terrorist”, as one newspaper dubbed him – the kind of man who caused a collective tut across middle England when he stormed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s pulpit – to widely-feted human rights hero? It was probably the moment when he was knocked unconscious by Robert Mugabe’s bodyguards as he tried to perform a citizen’s arrest on the reviled Zimbabwean leader in Brussels in 2001.

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