On the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) observed on May 17, 2025, the Dataout Foundation announces its mission: uncovering discrimination and crimes based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) through research and open data.
The purpose of the IDAHOBIT is to raise awareness about the issues LGBTQIA+ people experience and promote equal rights for everyone. By launching on this day, we highlight the importance of conducting research and producing open source methods, tools, and data to make SOGIESC-based discrimination visible. The foundation’s name reflects its goal: bringing impactful knowledge and data out into the open, so that journalists, researchers, human rights advocates, and policymakers are better equipped to improve the social and legal environment for LGBTQIA+ people.
Dataout is based in The Hague, the international hub for human rights organisations. From here, we contribute to the global effort of exposing discrimination and violence and strengthening LGBTQIA+ rights. While the IDAHOBIT is observed in more than 150 countries, there are still regions where information about the lives of LGBTQIA+ people is censored and human rights violations are often underreported. We focus on these countries first to collect evidence and help close critical knowledge gaps.
Grey Rainbow
Before today’s public launch, Dataout, in collaboration with researchers, has been developing a project called Grey Rainbow. Its goal is the continuous documentation of harmful consequences of anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in Russia, including such indirect harms as hate crimes. In our latest research, we collected evidence of hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people in Russia from court rulings. We made an overview of such crimes for 14 years (from 2010 through 2023) and published a database. In the absence of official statistics, our research shows the scale of SOGIESC-based hate crimes and provides evidence necessary for the future condemnation of discriminatory laws in Russia. Read more about our work on the project website.
Join us
Get updates about our work on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Follow our GitHub for open-source tools and methods we develop and use. Support us with a donation or become a member on Patreon. With your help, we can collect more data and produce more impactful knowledge.