Earlier this month, the UN Office of the High Commissioner released the United Nations’ first-ever report on the human rights issues facing lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people around the globe. That report, unsurprisingly, finds “a pattern of human rights violations,” spanning hate-based murder and violence, torture, criminalization, detention, and discrimination, and that many governments have failed to halt such violations, at the very least. In 76 countries, same-sex sexual conduct remains illegal, and in five of those countries (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, and Mauritania), the death penalty can be levied against those convinced of homosexual intercourse.
In response to the report’s findings, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner, called for the full repeal of such laws and an end to capital punishment for consensual sex acts; equal age-of-consent laws for homosexual and heterosexual acts; and comprehensive legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Other policy recommendations in the report include that all UN member countries fully investigate, and collect data upon acts of violence targeting LGBT people; train law enforcement to treat LGBT people fairly; introduce anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia public education campaigns in schools and elsewhere; and that asylum laws incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity as a legitimate basis of establishing persecution. This report follows last June’s U.N. Human Rights Council resolution condemning violence and discrimination against LGBT people, and will be discussed by the Council this coming March.
This report also comes right on the heels of the presidential memorandum issued by the Obama Administration several weeks ago outlining the steps that federal agencies should take to promote international LGBT human rights through diplomacy and foreign assistance. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized the Administration’s position in her dramatic Human Rights Day speech in Geneva. The State Department agenda of protecting LGBT people overlaps with the UN report in calling for legal reform, documenting of human rights violations, and incorporating LGBT-specific concerns into refugee, asylum, and immigration policies and procedures. Moreover, the memorandum specifically directs U.S. embassies and agencies to publicly support LGBT rights in general, and LGBT human rights defenders and civil society groups in particular, as well as to work in bilateral relations and through regional, and multilateral forums to institutionalize an end to violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Clinton’s speech anticipated the range of criticisms she knew would follow her speech and the White House memorandum, from her acknowledgement of the slow & incomplete journey within the United States towards full citizenship for LGBT Americans to declaring that “being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality.” Historian Jim Downs criticized her speech, arguing that Clinton was providing fuel for conservative politicians such as Texas Governor Rick Perry to reignite the domestic culture wars. To be sure, the struggling presidential candidate released a statement condemning the White House memorandum as part of the “administration’s war on traditional values.” But beyond the failure of Perry’s anti-LGBT politicking to capture 2012 voters’ imagination with Karl Rove’s 2004 tactics (witness the backlash to his “Strong” campaign video, which is approaching 700,000 “dislikes” as of this writing, by far the most negative reaction to a video in YouTube history), Downs appears to miss the recent historical context in which Secretary Clinton, the Obama Administration more generally, and the United Nations human rights bodies are intervening.
A clue to that context appears in Vladimir Putin’s recent comments directed at Secretary Clinton. On the one hand, the Prime Minister dismissed Clinton’s “serious concerns” about potential fraud during recent parliamentary elections in Russia, and alleged that the U.S. State Department was behind the democratic protests taking place on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. On the other hand, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, himself drew the connection between Western concerns about both those elections and the anti-LGBT bill introduced in St. Petersburg by Putin’s United Russia Party. The State Department in particular declared that it was “deeply concerned about the bill,” which would mandate fines of thousands of rubles for any “public act” that promoted homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgender identity, and reiterated Clinton’s declaration that “Gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.”
In an interview with David Remnick, Putin’s spokesman sneeringly moved between the two topics. Peskov first declared that “We have special services, and we have all the data about [election monitoring] N.G.O.s being sponsored by foreign states.” When Remnick pressed the Kremlin spokesman on Putin’s reaction to Western pressure, he responded:
A smile returned to the spokesman’s lips. “Actually, I was coming here in the car listening to the radio,” he said. “Do you know what was the first item on the news? The State Department of the United States expressed its gravest concern about the policy in Russia toward gays!” Peskov was referring to proposed legislation in St. Petersburg that would prohibit “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism to minors.” He was in stitches now. “I thought, What is the State Department of the United States doing? With their national debt! With their collapsing economy! With a leak of industry in the country because everything is in a financial bubble! With a nightmare in Afghanistan! With a nightmare in Iraq! With a nightmare in the global economy! And they have a deep concern about gays in Russia. Ha! Ha! So I was really in a very good mood because of this!
In Putin’s Russia, LGBT activism represents one strand of the broader democratic civil society struggling to break through the political tundra. In these responses, we see how Peskov’s homophobic joking slurs American concerns about the state of democracy in Russia, while United Russia’s bill explicitly circumscribes the citizenship of LGBT Russians.
Therein lies the significance of recent U.N. and U.S. moves to guarantee the fundamental human rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people. Those efforts build upon the political labor of LGBT people and their allies around the world over the past two decades, from grassroots activists to judges, NGOs, and diplomats in both the Global South and North. More specifically, from the constitutional guarantees banning discrimination in post-apartheid South Africa to marriage equality in Argentina to new protections for LGBT rights in Nepal, a consensus has emerged in the liberal democratic world that LGBT rights are indeed human rights.
In turn, the most egregious abuses — from Russia to the executions of LGBT people in Iran and Saudi Arabia to the proposed “kill-the-gays” bill in Uganda — take place in societies where democratic governance is either severely compromised or non-existent, and where LGBT people serve as scapegoats for autocratic regimes. Indeed, the recent Ugandan situation (where American evangelicals — some of whom are no doubt supporting Governor Perry’s presidential bid — have lobbied Kampala to impose the death penalty for homosexuality appears to have particularly galvanized the U.S. and the U.N. to develop best practices for supporting the human rights of LGBT around the globe. Nonetheless, although Washington and Geneva are playing catch up with the rest of the liberal democratic world, the grand significance of recent U.S. and U.N. moves is that these two critical players in international human rights now acede to the emerging consensus that liberal democratic governance and institutionalized homophobia and transphobia are structurally incompatible.
Ian Lekus 