the un's human rights chief called it a comprehensive onslaught. then the podium filled with funding pledges, and at least one of them was four months old.

via the Washington Blade, whose reporter was in the room, with the event confirmed on UN Web TV and the UK pledge on Kaleidoscope Trust.

The UN put it on the calendar as "Championing Diversity in Times of Adversity: Standing Up for LGBTI Persons," which is the sort of title written when nobody wants to say the subject out loud. It got said out loud anyway, by the highest-ranking human rights official on the planet.

Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the LGBTI Core Group event on Monday, held on the sidelines of the 81st General Assembly, that queer and intersex people "continue to live and to love in the face of hostility and exclusion," according to the Blade. Their rights and safety and wellbeing are under attack, he said, and he called it "a comprehensive onslaught."

He named countries, which is the part diplomats usually decline to do. He cited the raids Turkish police carried out in Istanbul and other cities, which we covered when 150 people were taken to the Caglayan courthouse and again when the raids reached the associations themselves. He cited Senegal, which criminalized consensual same-sex relations further this year. He noted that some governments now classify LGBTI rights organizations as "terrorists, extremists, or national security threats."

And the number that sat under all of it: 90 percent of LGBTQ and intersex rights groups worldwide have lost funding since January 2025, a figure we wrote about at length when it first landed.

Then the pledges. The Netherlands' foreign minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma announced 50 million euros. Britain's Chris Elmore announced 21 million pounds covering 2026 to 2029. Both are real money and both are welcome, and it is worth knowing that the British 21 million is not new: the UK government announced that same three-year commitment on May 19, four months before anyone said it into a microphone at the General Assembly.

That is not a scandal, just the shape of the thing. The onslaught compounds in real time and the response is the same money, announced twice, in a nicer room.