Left crippled by deadly Hurricane Maria in 2017, many Puerto Ricans felt the federal government had abandoned them. Close to two years later, they think they know why: the current occupant of the White House.
Later this week, the House will vote on a $17.2 billion disaster relief bill that would provide billions for the storm-ravaged island, as opposed to the mere $600 million President Trump wants to send the island to restart a nutrition program that faced a funding lapse last month.
“The post-disaster needs of Puerto Rico are not being met. Period,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) told VICE News.
The partisan gridlock in Washington that’s crippled that nutrition program has left 100,000 Puerto Ricans who enrolled for benefits after the hurricane, while more than a million people have seen their food aid cut by hundreds of dollars each month, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are backing the president’s position that Puerto Rico has already been helped, but Democrats still blame the administration for its inept response that left many powerless, hungry or dead.
That’s why this resistance to funding fellow American citizens has infuriated Democrats.
“IT'S OBSCENE”
“It’s obscene,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) told VICE News at the Capitol earlier this month. “And the comments that he makes and that people in his administration make, as if it were a foreign country, is just as outrageous as outrageous can be.”
It’s not just Puerto Ricans who are suffering from this partisan stalemate. Californians who lost most everything in raging wildfires, Midwestern farmers devastated by floods, and residents of Florida and Georgia battered by hurricanes are ensnared in the standoff as they wait for Trump and Democrats to work out a deal.
“It’s a simple proposition: The 3.5 million Americans who live in Puerto Rico are exactly that: Americans. They deserve from their country no less than any other citizen whether they be in Florida, Georgia or any other place,” Menendez said. “And so at the end of the day, I’m for disaster assistance for everybody — always have been, always will be — but that means everybody. And that means Puerto Rico as well.”
Republicans bristle at charges that there are racist undercurrents to the president’s position.
“That’s just garbage – that’s garbage,” Sen. David Purdue (R-Ga.) yelled at VICE News from an elevator in the Capitol earlier this month. “This president, he’s already demonstrated – he’s been more than helpful. We’ve already sent $40 billion. That comment is ridiculous.”
But government officials in Puerto Rico say it will take them $139 billion to recover from the storm, while the federal Office of Management and Budget estimates it could spend as much as $91 billion on the island over the next two decades. President Trump says he wants to cut off Puerto Rico from more federal recovery funds, and many of his allies on Capitol Hill agree.
“He’s really concerned about how Puerto Rico has spent money in the past. They need a lot of oversight,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told reporters at the Capitol earlier this month. “He’s right on a lot of this, and to just send money down there without any restrictions or oversight is a mistake — a big mistake.”
The administration contends the economically beleaguered island needs to get its own finances in order, and that footing more of its own rebuilding bill will contribute to stability.
“If you don’t have skin in the game, then it’s not in anyone’s best interest,” acting FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor told Bloomberg on Friday. “It’s in their interest to do it as quickly as possible.”
SENATE ROADBLOCK
Democrats dismiss those notions coming from administration officials, and the president himself appeared to be unclear about the citizen status of Puerto Ricans, tweeting at one point that they “only take from USA.”
“His tweet about Puerto Rico – where I was born – he says, ‘They keep taking money away. They keep asking [for] money from the USA,’ as if they were a foreign country,” Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) told VICE News at the Capitol. “They’re not taking from the USA. We’re all the USA.”
It’s likely that the Senate will reject the House bill to infuse billions of dollars into Puerto Rico’s recovery effort, but it’s clear that Puerto Ricans are bewildered and hurt by Trump’s position that to many seems to have to do more with the color of their skin than with the territory’s poor economic portfolio.
“Oh, it is hurtful. Shouldn’t he know better? He’s the president of the United States. Shouldn’t he know that they’re part of this country?” Serrano said. “That we are part of this country?”
(Beirut,) – Saudi Arabia’s government announced the mass execution of 37 men on April 23, 2019 in various parts of the country, Human Rights Watch said today. At least 33 of the 37 were from the country’s minority Shia community and had been convicted following unfair trials for various alleged crimes, including protest-related offenses, espionage, and terrorism. The mass execution was the largest since January 2016, when Saudi Arabia executed 47 men for terrorism offenses.
The Specialized Criminal Court convicted 25 of the 37 men in two mass trials, known as the “Qatif 24 case” and the “Iran spy case,” both of which included allegations that authorities extracted confessions through torture. One of the executed Sunni men received the harshest punishment under Islamic law, which includes beheading and public display of the beheaded corpse (salb). With this mass execution, Saudi Arabia carried out over 100 executions so far in 2019, including 40 for drug offenses, a much higher rate than previous years.
“Saudi authorities will inevitably characterize those executed as terrorists and dangerous criminals, but the reality is that Saudi courts are largely devoid of any due process and many of those executed were condemned based solely on confessions they credibly say were coerced,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The death penalty is never the answer to crimes and executing prisoners en masse shows that the current Saudi leadership has little interest in improving the country’s dismal human rights record.”
The official Saudi Press Agency stated that authorities executed the 37 “for their adoption of terrorist and extremist thinking, forming terrorism cells to sow corruption and disrupt security, spread chaos, incite sectarian discord, harm peace and social security, and attack police centers using explosive bombs.” The statement said the executions took place in various regions, including Riyadh, Mecca, Medina, Al-Qassim, Asir, and Eastern Province.
Fourteen of the men who were among the defendants in the Qatif 24 casewere from that Shia-majority area. The Specialized Criminal Court convicted them on protest-related crimes, and some faced charges of violence including targeting police patrols or police stations with guns and Molotov cocktails. Saudi media have described the 24 men as members of a “terrorism cell” that carried out over 50 armed attacks targeting security forces that killed an unspecified number of them and injured dozens.
The court convicted nearly all defendants based on confessions they later repudiated in court, saying the authorities had tortured them. The court sentenced 14 of the defendants to death in June 2016, and an appeals court upheld the verdict in May 2017. The court sentenced nine others to prison terms of between three and 15 years and exonerated one defendant.
Qatif 24 defendants executed on April 23 include Mujtaba al-Sweikat, whom authorities arrested on August 12, 2012, as he was trying to board a plane bound for the United States to attend Western Michigan University, and Munir al-Adam, who Saudi activists say lost hearing in one ear following beatings by interrogators.
Eleven of the executed men were part of the Iran spy case, which involved 32 defendants. They were accused of offenses constituting “high treason,” including meeting with Iranian “intelligence agents” and passing them confidential military information and background information on Shia communities in Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Authorities detained 17 people on March 16, 2013, 14 others later in 2013, and one in 2014, but did not bring them to trial until early 2016.
In addition to espionage, prosecutors in the Iran spy case also brought charges that do not represent recognizable crimes, including “supporting demonstrations,” “distorting the reputation of the kingdom,” and attempting to “spread the Shia confession” in Saudi Arabia. Mohammad Abd al-Ghani Attiyah, who was among the 37 men executed, faced these charges as well as “planning with an Iranian intelligence element… to establish a company to spread Shia activities in [Eastern Province].”
Taha al-Haji, a Saudi lawyer who represented a group of the “Iran spy case” defendants until March 2016, told Human Rights Watch that authorities held the men incommunicado for three months before allowing phone calls and visits with family members. The trial resulted in death sentences against 15 of the defendants. Saudi activists familiar with the cases told Human Rights Watch that families of the executed men were not told of the executions in advance.
Human Rights Watch analyzed 10 trial judgments that the Specialized Criminal Court handed down between 2013 and 2016 against men and children accused of protest-related crimes following popular demonstrations by members of the Shia minority in 2011 and 2012 in Eastern Province towns. In nearly all these judgments, defendants had retracted their confessions, saying they were coerced in circumstances that in some cases amounted to torture, including beatings and prolonged solitary confinement.
The court rejected all torture allegations without investigating the claims. It ignored defendants’ requests for video footage from the prison that they said would show them being tortured, and to summon interrogators as witnesses to describe how the confessions were obtained.
International standards, including the Arab Charter on Human Rights, ratified by Saudi Arabia, require countries that retain the death penalty to use it only for the “most serious crimes,” and in exceptional circumstances, following a judgment by a competent court. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest execution rates in the world and applies the death penalty to a range of offenses that do not constitute “most serious crimes,” including drug offenses.
Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all countries and under all circumstances. Capital punishment is unique in its cruelty and finality, and it is inevitably and universally plagued with arbitrariness, prejudice, and error.
Most recently in 2018, the United Nations General Assembly called on countries to establish a moratorium on the use of the death penalty, progressively restrict the practice, and reduce the offenses for which it might be imposed, all with the view toward its eventual abolition. Then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on all countries in 2013 to abolish the death penalty.
“Mass executions are not the mark of a ‘reformist’ government, but rather one marked by capricious, autocratic rule,” Page said.
Peter Nunn is 32 and he's happy. He lives just outside Atlanta with his husband Monte, his dog Amelie, and their cat Hollow.
The dining room is decorated with a photo gallery wall of family — his husband dancing with his mother at their wedding and pictures of the couple. But it took a long time and work to get to a place where Nunn said he accepted and loved himself.
As a gay man, Nunn said, his father tried to change him.
"When I was 15, my parents found a men's workout magazine that I had and drew their own conclusions," he said. "My dad told me we were going to go on a trip and didn't tell me where we were going."
On the way to their mystery destination, Nunn's father turned to him.
"He said he was going to take me to a therapy center to deal with whatever weird sexual stuff I had going on," Nunn said. "If it didn't work, he was going to send me to military school to make a man out of me."
In that moment, everything he knew felt threatened: his relationship with his parents, his home, his social circle. He said that every day for two weeks at a therapy center in Iowa, licensed mental health professionals told him that what he was feeling was sinful, that he needed to change or his soul was in jeopardy, that he was broken.
What Nunn was going through was conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy. It is a widely discredited practice aimed at changing a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. In most of the country, the therapy is still legal for minors. But advocacy groups are trying to change that by pushing legislation in statehouses across the country to ban licensed mental health professionals from practicing conversion therapy on minors. So far 16 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have banned the practice. Colorado is expected to sign a ban into law soon.
And Nunn is trying to help get it passed in Georgia where House Bill 580 was recently introduced. He's supporting the bill to help other young people avoid the trauma he lived through.
Peter Nunn (right) and his husband Monte Nunn live just outside Atlanta with their pets.
Peter Nunn for NPR
"Conversion therapy is something that at its core is telling somebody that there's something fundamentally broken with them and not only can it be fixed, it needs to be fixed," Nunn said in his living room. "That's a lot of trauma, especially for somebody that's 15 years old or 10 years old or however old."
Suicide as a side effect
At 15, Nunn was convinced he needed to be "fixed." When he wasn't, he tried to take his life in the woods behind a friend's house. A note in his pocket said, "God forgive me."
His suicide attempt is an all-too-frequent side effect of conversion therapy. LGBT youth are already much more likely to try to take their life than their peers are. But kids whose parents try to change their sexual orientation attempt suicide at more than double the rate of their LGBT peers; the suicide rate is nearly triple among young people who also deal with intervention from "therapists and religious leaders."
Matthew Wilson, a Democratic state representative in Georgia, introduced the legislation in a majority Republican State House.
"I specifically asked just for a hearing this year, no vote, so that we could use this year as an educational moment to really raise awareness about the need for this and how there really is no controversy here, people really aren't opposing this, at least not in Georgia," he said.
The bill has the same language as other bills that have passed or introduced. It would bar mental health professionals in the state from practicing conversion therapy on minors. When people turn 18, they can put themselves through conversion therapy.If passed, the law wouldn't interfere with clergy and religious counseling.
"There's been an outcry, not just from the victims and the LGBTQ community," Wilson said. "But from the medical professionals who say this is not medicine and not only is it not medicine but the harm is very real and lasts a lifetime."
Medical and mental health professions decry practice
Nearly 700,000 adults have gone through conversion therapy, some half of them as minors, according to a 2018 study from The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
A number of medical and mental health associations list the practice as something that doesn't work and is harmful. The American Psychological Association says conversion therapy has "serious potential to harm young people because they present the view that the sexual orientation of lesbian, gay and bisexual youth is a mental illness or disorder, and they often frame the inability to change one's sexual orientation as a personal and moral failure."
The American Psychiatric Association says ethical practitioners shouldn't try to change someone's sexuality because of their responsibility to do no harm. In a position statement in 2000, the association wrote that, after four decades, practitioners of "reparative" therapy, "have not produced any rigorous scientific research to substantiate their claims of cure," meanwhile there are "anecdotal claims of psychological harm."
Conversion therapy can be a lot of different things
"Sometimes this takes the form of religious prayer. This is where you get the 'pray the gay away' kind of concept," said Sam Brinton, the head of advocacy and government affairs for the Trevor Project. "Sometimes this takes the form of talk therapy where a person may be sitting on a couch and thinking that their mother was overbearing or their father was distant and this is what made them gay ... and then in some rare cases, there is a version of this therapy where people try to attach a negative stimulus to an action."
Brinton went through the most extreme version, electroshock therapy so that they would hate "any connection that I had to my homosexuality."
All of these practices can lead to depression, self-harm and, in some cases, suicide.
"It's really important that we recognize that parents are actually being lied to here," Brinton said. "So although I want to support a parent's ability to raise their child as they see fit, we still have protections in this country that protect youth from harm despite any objections of the parent. And we also have laws that make sure that parents shouldn't be lied to or defrauded by these snake oil salesmen."
One of the most well-known national organizations providing conversion therapy, Exodus International, disbanded after the president, Alan Chambers, disavowed the therapy in 2012 and apologized for any harm or pain it had caused. John Paulk, a known advocate of conversion therapy and of the "ex-gay" movement, came out in 2013 and disavowed the therapy.
But not everyone is on board with legislation to ban the practice. Liberty Counsel, an evangelical Christian group, is trying to stop the bans through the courts.
"The counselors that we work with, they try to respect the wishes of the client and the client is that minor. It's not the parents, it's the client and that's who they have the responsibility to," said Mat Staver, the head of Liberty Counsel. "And some of those particular clients want to be affirmed in these attractions. Others want to overcome those attractions or live with them but ultimately not engage in certain desires that they may have. So they work with those clients on an individual basis."
Staver says conversion therapy bans are a violation of free speech for counselors and a minor's right to "self-autonomy." He takes issue with the term "conversion therapy" calling it a politicized term used to conjure up dangerous images of what goes on in this type of counseling.
"There's no other area in counseling where the government has barged into the private counseling room and this should be no exception," he said. "And it's just a matter of time before the High Court expressly overrules all these cases and all these laws."
Recently, the Supreme Court declined to take a case that would have challenged the conversion therapy ban in New Jersey.
Advocates of the ban say that if a practice is deemed harmful or abusive to children in other cases, the state does intervene.
Embracing the journey
The depth of that harm is something Greg and Lynn McDonald, of Johns Creek, Ga., say they didn't understand when they found out their son, Greg, was gay. They describe themselves as conservative Christians and were worried that their son was committing a sin.
EUREKA SPRINGS, Ark. — On the count of three, about 50 gay couples kissed their partners in the public square of a small town in the Ozark Mountains.
Jay Wilks, the event’s organizer, told the crowd to do it over.
“With more passion this time!” he shouted into the microphone.
Wilks counted down again, and queer and trans people embraced their partners, now with the gusto he demanded. The couples, decked out in so much pride gear that despite the day’s clear weather rainbows abounded, held each other, laughed and, most important, kissed.
It was PDA in the Park, the signature event of early April’s Spring Diversity Weekend in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Eureka is a rural, hilly town of about 2,000 people where locals say over 30 percent of residents are LGBTQ and playfully remark their town has “no straight streets.” Amber Clark, 36, who has rainbow-dyed hair, drove in for the weekend from Carthage, Missouri, a city of less than 15,000 where you’d be hard-pressed to find 100 queer people making out in the small downtown. She came with what she characterized as “a group of loud, out, queer women.”
“We’re here to be normal for a weekend,” she said, “and to kiss in the park.”
About 2.9 to 3.8 million LGBTQ people live in rural America, and they are increasingly finding that they don’t need to travel to a big city or the coasts to find a place to be themselves and unwind on vacation.
Public imagination renders LGBTQ people as city dwellers, and the dominant narrative says anyone queer or trans living in rural America yearns for escape. There is some truth in that, and for good reason — a recent survey found that Arkansas residents were the least supportive of measures to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, compared to residents of other states. But in Eureka Springs, Wilks, who runs Out in Eureka, an LGBTQ event and information organization, is working to create what he sees as an oasis: a space for LGBTQ people to explore a quaint Southern town while being welcomed exactly as they are.
Other cities and towns in red states have also begun courting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer tourists, as a way of showing their openness and because there’s money to be made. (It’s difficult to determine the economic impact of LGBTQ travelers, but by using population data, the United Nations World Tourism Association estimates they generate more than $50 billion in annual revenue in the U.S.)
Performers and attendees at Diversity Weekend in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.Ludwig Hurtado / NBC News
Salt Lake City is so dedicated to making sure people know it’s LGBTQ-friendly that it has an explainer on its tourism website that begins, “Yes, Salt Lake IS a great place for the LGBTQ Community.”
Oklahoma City tries to entice LGBTQ tourists with its annual Memorial Day gay rodeo and its small but thriving gayborhood.
Forty miles southwest of Eureka Springs, Fayetteville is on a similar mission, trying to appeal to LGBTQ people in Arkansas and neighboring states, for whom going on vacation to a major city is cost prohibitive — or not at all desirable. People who are rural and queer, or Southern and queer, often feel like they need to give up one of those identities, but city leaders in Fayetteville and Eureka Springs are marketing their towns as a place where visitors and residents alike can have it all, even if the state’s politics are not as progressive.
“Our focus is not to become a San Francisco or a Fort Lauderdale,” Wilks, 51, a former flight attendant, said. “Fire Island is fun,” he added of the gay destination east of New York City, but Wilks wants to remain “true to who Eureka is” — a small town that’s wooded, Southern and super gay.
‘DO THEY REALLY WANT US HERE?’
Fayetteville recently became the first city in Arkansas to join the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association, which provides free resources, travel suggestions and safety tips to LGBTQ travelers. The city of about 85,000 has always had a reputation for being progressive, especially within its own state, partly because it’s a college town that votes blue. Since 2014, Fayetteville fought to get an LGBTQ nondiscrimination law on its books, but the state supreme court struck it down in January.
That put Molly Rawn, executive director of Experience Fayetteville, the city’s tourism office, in a bit of a bind. How do you convince LGBTQ people to come to your city, which prides itself on inclusivity, when the state sends a different message?
One way Rawn does it is by being clear in her message to LGBTQ folks: “We want you here,” she said.
A Pride participant in Fayetteville in 2018.Courtesy Vincent Griffin
Experience Fayetteville takes out ads in gay newspapers in nearby cities and neighboring states touting its attractions and making sure queer and trans folks know they can visit without worry.
“In my experience, you only have to get them here once, and then they come back,” Rawn said. A lifelong Arkansan, she knows she’s fighting an uphill battle — while she loves the state, she acknowledges that it isn’t always a great place to be LGBTQ, with a lack of workplace discrimination protections and scant health care for trans people.
Still, Fayetteville Pride, the biggest gay event of the year, has flourished, drawing visitors from all over the region. The first parade in 2005 drew about 200 attendees; last year, it had over 15,000. John Tanzella, president and CEO of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association, was thrilled when Fayetteville wanted to be promoted by his organization. But some travel writers and tourists wrote to his organization and asked: “Is it really somewhere welcoming?” and “Do they really want us there?”
His answer: “Yes.”
Tanzella said that in recent years, gay tourism has “evolved from a one-size-fits model to all these different niches.” No longer just cruises and bed-and-breakfasts in Provincetown, Massachusetts, LGBTQ tourism has grown as diverse as the community itself. One of those niches is LGBTQ people who live in the South or the Midwest, and aren’t itching for big city life — they just want a place to be themselves.
Still, the impulse to court LGBTQ tourists doesn’t sit well with everyone.
Brody Parrish, a queer, trans and nonbinary Fayetteville resident, said the effort to draw LGBTQ visitors feels like a “misappropriation of resources.”
Parrish believes Northwest Arkansas should focus on allocating resources to its LGBTQ residents by increasing health care access and opening spaces like community drop-in centers were queer and trans people can congregate. Progressive cities like Fayetteville should “really be putting in the work to make it a safe space for everyone to exist here.”
“I would love to meet random LGBT people that come to this area to visit,” Parrish added, but at the same time, “What are you doing to support those people that are in your town, versus trying to bring people from other areas?”
‘IT FEELS LIKE HOME’
Melodye Purdy moved to Eureka Springs about 15 years ago from Memphis, Tennessee. She and her partner chose Eureka mostly because “there is no other place on Earth like it.”
“Being a woman and being a lesbian, it was very important to find a sense of security and safety,” Purdy, 53, said. Some “gay-friendly” places she and her partner considered seemed to cater only to men, while others, like Key West and Provincetown, felt too far from her home in the South. “I did think that I had to leave the South to be a lesbian,” she said. But in Eureka, among the curvy streets, she found home. “I was wrong.”
Melodye PurdyLudwig Hurtado / NBC News
Eureka’s reputation as an LGBTQ haven isn’t new — at least for Northwest Arkansas residents. It started as a hippie town in the ’70s, and slowly, queer and trans people began moving there. The picturesque town features old saloons with rainbow flags, a haunted hotel, and dozens of other gay-owned shops, restaurants and businesses. Every bar in Eureka, residents like to say, is a gay bar.
Ashley Buckmaster, 36, makes the two-hour drive from her home in Carthage, Missouri, to Eureka Springs a couple times a year. “It’s not scary to go places here,” Buckmaster, who is queer, said at Diversity Weekend. On her visits, she’s met and made lifelong friends. “It feels like home.”
That is exactly why Wilks organizes Diversity Weekend.
“With the cost of travelling to some of the major cities, it’s not something that everyone can just up and do,” he said. “Gay affluence” is a largely a myth, and transgender people often face structural hurdles to finding work and housing. Eureka, Wilks and others hope, can provide an affordable and safe refuge.
‘WE’RE MOVING’
Preparing for his first trip to Eureka Springs a year ago, Ethan Avanzino, 30, said he took out a lot of cash.
“My initial thought of Arkansas was like: ‘Do they take credit cards? Can we barter?'” Avanzino, a gay trans man who grew up on the West Coast and currently lives in Dallas, said. He’s been back four times since then, making the six-to-seven-hour drive with his husband.
On Diversity Weekend this April, he returned to enjoy the festivities and to lead a “Transgender 101” workshop for visitors and community members.
Ethan Avanz
In the town’s public library, people asked Avanzino about they/them pronouns, what it means to be intersex and how best to support the trans people in their lives. Outside the library window, if you looked east, you could see a 66-foot white statue of Jesus called “Christ of the Ozarks” towering over the hills.
In Dallas, Avanzino is out and does media production for a Fortune 500 company; things are pretty good. But there’s something about Eureka that he feels like he can’t get elsewhere. “The inclusivity in the South is what captured me,” he said. “I like to disconnect and be out in the middle of the wilderness and not have cell reception.”
“Our first weekend in Eureka, I was like, ‘This is the place,’” Avanzino added. It will take him and his husband a few years to uproot their lives, but there’s one thing the two know for sure: “We’re moving.”
London (CNN Business)Royal Dutch Shell's stand on LGBT rights has come under scrutiny following the introduction of laws that punish gay sex with death in Brunei.
The Anglo-Dutch oil giant is the largest foreign business operating in the small southeast Asian kingdom, which brought in laws earlier this month that make gay sex and adultery punishable by stoning.
Shell has long been a champion of LGBT rights, and some shareholders are now voicing concerns about how the laws will affect its 3,500 employees in Brunei.
More companies boycott Brunei over anti-gay laws
Eumedion, an organization that represents Dutch institutional investors, said it would raise the issue during its next regular meeting with Shell's leadership.
The move was first reported by the Financial Times.
Shell operates a joint venture with Brunei's government that generates 90% of the country's oil and gas revenue. It's the most important company in a country where 61% of GDP comes from the oil and gas sector.
The new laws run counter to corporate policies at Shell that are strongly protective of the rights of LGBT employees.
The company has robust diversity and inclusion programs. It sponsors gay pride events in cities around the world, has long-standing LGBT employee support networks and regularly flies rainbow flags in its offices.
It's also a corporate partner of the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBT rights. The group has described the Brunei laws as "state-sponsored torture and murder of LGBTQ people."
Eumedion said that the shareholders it represents are concerned that Shell's diversity policies might be compromised.
"It is expected from the company that they live up to their policies on inclusion and LGBT-equality, wherever they have operations," Eumedion said in a statement sent to CNN Business.
A source with knowledge of the situation said that while Eumedion is concerned about the welfare of Shell employees, it does not expect the company to publicly lobby against Brunei's laws.
The goal of raising the issue with Shell management is to "protect the company's human capital," the source added.
Shell said in a statement that "our core value of respect for people means that we respect all people, irrespective of gender, age, race, religion, sexual orientation and all the things that make people different."
Is the sultan of Brunei imposing Sharia law to clean up his family's image?
Shell (RDSA) is not the only company facing scrutiny over Brunei.
A number of celebrities and businesses, including Deutsche Bank (DB) and Richard Branson, announced earlier this month they'd boycott the Dorchester Collection, a luxury hotel chain
owned by the Sultan of Brunei.
STA Travel, which focuses on travel for students and young people, stopped selling flights on Brunei's national carrier, Royal Brunei Airlines, "in protest at recent changes to the law."
"Brazil can't be a country of the gay world, of gay tourism. We have families," he added.
Mr Bolsonaro has already drawn ire for being a self-described "homophobic".
He reportedly made his latest comments at a breakfast meeting with reporters in the country's capital BrasÃlia.
Is the honeymoon period over for Brazil's Bolsonaro?
A tale of two Trumps
An immediate backlash has been prompted from Brazil's LGBT community.
"This is not a head of state - this is a national disgrace," said David Miranda, a councillor in Rio de Janeiro, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper.
"He is staining the image of our country in every imaginable way," Mr Miranda added.
The Brazilian president, a former army captain, is a deeply divisive figure whose racist, homophobic and misogynistic remarks have angered many.
In previous interviews he has said he would rather have a dead son than a homosexual son.
Earlier this month, New York's American Museum of Natural History cancelled an event to honour Mr Bolsonaro on its premises.
