U.N. Strikes GLBT Protections

The U.N. has amended a resolution by removing language that would have offered protections to GLBT people worldwide. The change was in response to Asian and African nations pushing to delete those protections, which had been part of a similar resolution in 2008. GLBT equality advocates now worry that nations with anti-gay governments will see the deletion as carte blanche to step up persecution against sexual minorities.

The resolution decries "arbitrary and unjust executions," reported The Raw Story on Nov. 21. Morocco and Mali led the charge to drop the protections covering GLBTs.

The head of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Cary Alan Johnson, condemned the change as "dangerous and disturbing," saying that the deletion of the language "essentially removes the important recognition of the particular vulnerability faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people--a recognition that is crucial at a time when 76 countries around the world criminalize homosexuality, five consider it a capital crime, and countries like Uganda are considering adding the death penalty to their laws criminalizing homosexuality."

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission is a U.S.-based organization that only recently won accreditation from the United Nations. The Obama administration had pressed for that accreditation, and welcomed it as an "important step forward for human rights," in the words of President Obama. A number of the same nations that voted to strip the resolution of language to protect gays also voted not to accredit the IGLHRC.

The article noted that Uganda joined 78 other nations in voting to strike the protections for gays from the resolution. 70 nations voted to retain those protections. Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq were among the 79 nations that voted to remove the language in question; the U.S. was among those nations that sought to preserve protections against unjust executions for gays.

The Huffington Post reported on Nov. 22 that the Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions resolution had contained a provision that investigators should look into killings "committed for any discriminatory reason, including sexual orientation." The U.N. vote removed the last three words of that sentence.

British GLBT equality campaigner Peter Tatchell struck out at the vote, saying, that scrubbing the language that would have extended protection to gays "gives a de facto green light to the on-going murder of LGBT people by homophobic regimes, death squads and vigilantes. They will take comfort from the fact that the UN does not endorse the protection of LGBT people against hate-motivated violence and murder."

Noted Tatchell, "The UN vote is in direct defiance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees equal treatment, non-discrimination and the right to life. What is the point of the UN if it refuses to uphold its own humanitarian values and declarations?"

In an article published at the Harvard Law Record on Oct. 6, 2005, author Sami Zeidan, who had served Lebanon as a diplomat to the U.N., argued that specified rights and protections right for sexual minorities were apt to act as roadblocks to important resolutions. Zeidan noted that nations with a strong religious influence--such as Catholic or Muslim nations--were often dead-set against such language. "The problem is that there is a strong Western bias in the very conception of existing human rights instruments," wrote Zeidan. "These were built upon premises of liberalism and individualism, and to impose these assumptions on cultures that reject them is often seen as a manifestation of imperialism."

Moreover, Zeidan said, many non-Western nations viewed the concept of human rights in general as a Western fabrication, and saw homosexuality as an import from the West, noting that, "most developing states firmly uphold that homosexuality does not exist in their culture! Therefore, it is difficult for them to see how an extension of rights to homosexuals would mean anything. It is as if they view western activists as constructing the politics of sexual minorities, with the aim of imposing them on the rest of the world. It is this perceived homogenization that is resisted by most UN member states." Added Zeidan, "In 1992, the Prime Minister of Malaysia even stated that the enhancement of democratic rights would actually lead to homosexuality!"

Anti-gay sentiment has been on the upswing in many African nations recently, due in part to religious and political anti-gay rhetoric. An April 12 article at The MSM Initiative, a website for amfAR, reported on the escalating anti-gay fervor in some African nations, and warned that increasing hostility toward gays would aggravate the HIV crisis that has hit parts of Africa hard. Men who have sex with men avoid getting tested for HIV in anti-gay political climates; efforts to educate and reach out to the public about fact-based matters of sexual health can get activists in trouble. The MSM article reported on several instances of anti-gay mob violence and official persecution faced by those seeking to inform and educate the public, including clinic workers in Kenya who were attacked, beaten, and doused with kerosene; efforts to set the men alight were not successful.

In Malawi, the article noted, an activist was arrested for possession of health material related to sexuality and HIV because authorities viewed it as "pornographic." Other arrests reportedly targeted supporters of two Malawi gay men who were imprisoned after hosting a party to celebrate their engagement to be married; the wedding would have not have been legal, since in Malawi marriage equality is against the law, but the celebration alone resulted in "indecency" charges under laws that are used to persecute gays.

The article also cited a bill being considered in Uganda that would punish gays with the death penalty for repeated sexual encounters with other men--or a single encounter, if the suspect is HIV+. The article noted that the anti-gay law was proposed following a visit to the Uganda by anti-gay American evangelicals who lectured about the "gay agenda."

"Homophobia, of course, is present in every country," the MSM Initiative article reads. "But a wave of homophobic rhetoric and violence in some African countries is undermining efforts to combat high rates of HIV/AIDS among MSM. Human rights activists, AIDS advocates, and grassroots MSM organizations-including a number of groups funded by amfAR's MSM Initiative-say that the progress that had been made over the past several years in reaching African MSM is being threatened by a new climate of fear and repression that is sweeping parts of the continent."