Since the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process began in 2007 at the Human Rights Council at the United Nations it has both forced governments to defend their polices as well as actually causing them to change them.

The current UPR session has already seen two countries agree to decriminalize homosexuality.

The Network of Sex Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean reported 28 August another murder of  a trans Mexican sex worker. Elisarraráz Carmela Mendez, secretary of the Monarchs Civil Liberty Organization of Michoacan, was found at 5am at the Imperial Hotel in Morelia, Michoacan, west of Mexico City.

The Belarussian gay website gayby reports that Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenkо - who has been described as "Europe's last dictator" - was unable to pronounce the word homosexuality on the first try at a 7 October press conference with Russian journalists.

They say:

Fed up with both day after day of nasty newspaper headlines and one civil society leader after another abandoning them, last Friday Accra's gay community came out, one-by-one, at a major "straight" forum.

Ghanian blogger Graham Knight described the collective coming out as "remarkable."