By Adele Poskitt, gay rights activist and Senior Policy Officer for CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation

May 17 marks the International Day against Homophobia, and naturally the call continues to reverberate amongst world leaders: “End the Discrimination” on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. Yet, at the same time, there are a frightening growing number of governments taking steps to strengthen laws criminalising homosexuality.  Across the globe, same-sex relations are currently criminalised in 70 countries and attacks on gay people are also on the rise.

So how far have we come in making gay rights universal?

It is over 20 years since issues about sexuality entered the human rights dialogue and for many people it certainly seems, at least,  a given that we are all equal and worthy of respect regardless of sexual orientation. However, sexuality remains one of the arenas where the universality of human rights has come under the most sustained attack. So my question is why is the issue of sexuality the one which governments most often seek to erect protective barriers of cultural and national sovereignty around to evade their internationally-recognised rights obligations?

Just last week, the Ugandan Parliament recommended a draft Bill that would impose the death penalty for homosexuality. This draconian law would be an extension to homosexuality already being criminalised in the poverty-ridden African nation where conservative Christian groups wield enormous influence.  Supporters of the Bill used arguments around state sovereignty, national identity and non-interference. The commonly heard phrase is that same-sex relations are “non-African”.

In Uganda homophobia is stoked and inflamed for political reasons in order to demarcate boundaries of citizenship and national belonging. The appeal to “cultural sovereignty” and “traditional values” as a justification for denying same-sex relations is being used to create a distraction from the government’s failures to provide basic services for its people. It seems governments are seeking to bolster its own domestic authority and fuel a populist issue regardless of the impact this has on marginalised and vulnerable groups.

Even in the United States, which perpetually trumpets its moral beacon status, the strong evangelical Christian movement has fuelled hate crimes against Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) communities throughout the world. At the same time that President Obama declared that “homosexual relationships are just as admirable and real as heterosexual relationship,” and several US states legally recognised same-sex partnerships, three U.S. evangelical Christians, whose teaching about “curing” homosexuality have been widely discredited in the U.S., gave a series of talks in Uganda.

When one assesses homophobia it is clear it is a global issue. Same-sex relations are currently criminalised in many African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya and Malaysia have all proposed amendments to the Commission on Human Rights and delete all reference to sexual orientation. In November 2010, 79 countries at the U.N. voted on an amendment to strip sexual orientation out of a document calling on governments to prevent extrajudicial executions. In reality what this means is that the state does not seek to protect the LGBT community and often fails to bring justice for hate crimes against gay people.

The number of threats, physical assaults and even murder of gay rights activists has increased in the past two years throughout the world. In the US, 20 per cent of hate crimes reported are against the LGBT community. In Brazil, 250 LGBT individuals were killed because of their sexual orientation or gender identity in 2010 alone – the equivalent to one person killed every 36 hours. In Uganda, in January this year, leading gay human rights activist David Kato was beaten to death in his home outside Kampala. In Malaysia, there has been outcry against “curative” camps where young men – some reported to be as young as 12 – are sent to “cure” gender and sexual non-conformity.

It is clear that International human rights commitments are failing to protect the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, and U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon have both called for the worldwide decriminalisation of homosexuality, “Laws criminalising homosexuality are incompatible with international human rights standards and fuel homophobia”.

In countries where gay activists have successfully used the discourse of human rights to fight discrimination there have been important approaches to the universal claims to justice, as well as recognition of local identity. We have seen several countries, including Australia, South Africa and the U.S., uphold the universal claims to privacy, equality and dignity to protect the rights of the LGBT community.

But more importantly, gay rights activists have fought to show that gay identify is not universal. In order to refute nationalist and cultural attacks, gay rights activists have demonstrated that homosexuality is rooted in their cultural and history. Through turning to local history and culture to question the idea of an authentic, opposite-sex sexuality and tradition, the LGBT community is challenging the notion of homosexuality as a Western import.

One shining light is South Africa, where human rights groups have been successful in demonstrating that identity is not one-dimensional. They have educated an audience that it is possible to be both gay and African. Once a community acknowledges this, it is then difficult to deny a person their rights and turn them into a non-citizen “other”. The early 1990s in South Africa was a period of significant change and many of the ANC leaders had been influenced by the politics of international liberal human rights thinking. As a result a key feature of the new Constitution was the enshrinement of equality and Bill of Rights which declares: “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds,” and includes “sexual orientation” alongside race, gender, age and other traits.

So as we mark international homophobia day I would suggest it is not a time to celebrate. In many Western countries we may take gay rights for granted, but most of the LGBT community around the world continues to live in fear of discrimination and physical abuse. There needs to be commitment by the international community to ensure that universal human rights standards are upheld to end the discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. But we must support and empower the courageous activists around the world who struggle in difficult and dangerous circumstances to articulate their homosexuality within the local context. 

(END/2011)