A Festival of Chichester event, organised by Chichester Humanists.

Peter Tatchell has been campaigning for human rights since 1967. He is best known for two attempted citizen’s arrests of the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, one of which resulted in him being beaten unconscious. He is Director of the human rights organisation, Peter Tatchell Foundation.

Peter staged the first gay rights protest in a communist country, in East Germany in 1973, and was arrested by the secret police, the Stasi. In the 1990s, he exposed how the Nazi war criminal, Dr Carl Vaernet, escaped justice at the end of the Second World War.

Notoriously, he led the OutRage! outing of ten Anglican Bishops in 1994, in protest at the way they publicly colluded with the church’s anti-gay stance despite their own secret homosexuality. In 1998, he interrupted the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter Sermon in protest at Dr Carey’s support for anti-gay laws.