Thursday 22 September 2011

Ginosi Corporation suspends sponsorship of Radio Van upon discovering their homophobic ‘credentials’

Ginosi Corporation travel company suspends sponsorship of Yerevan based Armenian radio station Radio Van upon discovering their homophobic ‘credentials’. In a letter signed on 21 September 2011, head of the Corporation informed the management of Radio Van that they are “disappointed and feel put down by your organization” and announced suspension of all sponsorship plans “effective immediately”.
We recently learned with shock and regret of discriminatory remarks that Shushanik Arevshatyan has made about gays and lesbians on the radio station's official website/blog. This puts Ginosi.com as a corporate sponsor of Radio Van in an awkward position not only with respect to our gay and lesbian customers, employees and business relations but also as a company that views corporate social responsibility and equal opportunity in its business practices as a top priority.

[...] We feel necessitated to suspend all future sponsorship plans for Radio Van effective immediately. [...]

With this letter we say good bye to Radio Van and finally, we believe that a public apology by Radio Van to the LGBT community is in order.
Ginosi Corporation further announced that they will be reviewing their current policies and practices with respect to corporate sponsorship programmes “to ensure that we will never again unknowingly finance bigotry.”

For original letter in full, see Ginosi.com

My respects to Ginosi Corporation. I hope such an exemplary stance for human rights and against homophobia will set a trend for other companies in Armenia, Diaspora and elsewhere to follow.

I am encouraged that increasing number of people and companies, local and international organisations, agencies and institutions started paying attention and acting upon Armenia: Homophobia Hall of Shame.

There is always a way out from this list of shame. However, I will only remove organisations or individuals from the Hall of Shame if I become convinced that they made genuine efforts to move on leaving homophobia behind.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This story also covered by Epress.am: http://www.epress.am/?p=129394