Entrepreneur, investment professional, and philanthropist David Colin Burke heads Selby Lane, LLC, as chairman and chief executive officer. Also the managing director of Tuolumne Capital, LP, he continues to work with the University of Virginia, where he earned his undergraduate degree, master’s, and juris doctor. David Colin Burke’s ongoing commitments to UVA include his work as vice-chair of the UVA Honor the Future Capital Campaign, as well as a board of trustee member of the UVA Law School Foundation and sponsor of the law school’s International Human Rights Clinic.
Through the International Human Rights Clinic, students in the UVA law program spend a year working as a team with human rights organizations to deliver legal and advocacy assistance to marginalized or threatened individuals, learning principles of human rights advocacy from the ground up.
One of the clinic’s most recent commitments involves its work helping LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly gay men, in Nigeria, all targeted under the country’s restrictive Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA).
The SSMPA was signed into law in 2014. While it nominally only prohibits the right of two people of the same sex to marry, in practice it sanctions a wide range of restrictions on participation in civil society, harassment, and persecution by self-appointed vigilante groups.
In 2018 dozens of men arrested in a hotel raid were prosecuted under the SSMPA. Students from the International Human Rights Clinic worked on the case, Nigeria v. Egbeda 57, documenting human rights abuses of gay Nigerians in general, including those involving vigilante violence. The students also interviewed men who were arrested but not charged and found numerous instances of illegal detention, apparent lapses in due process, and suspected violations of international prohibitions on torture.
The case was struck in October 2020, but the law remains on the books and Nigerians are still subject to arrest, criminal penalties, invasion of privacy, and social condemnation under its broad provisions.
