Introduction

This report tries to give a brief picture of a global human rights movement. In country after country, people have come together around issues of sexuality and gender—to organize against discrimination and abuse, to affirm their freedoms and their desires. These activists have changed politics and daily life in many places. Yet in some societies, including ones where violence and violations are most severe, they are still not accepted as full partners by other human rights movements.  They have struggled for their own togetherness at enormous cost. They are still apart.

The report is based on answers to questions Human Rights Watch asked (in surveys and in interviews) to 100 leading sexual rights activists from some 50 countries, all with long experience in the areas of sexual orientation and gender identity. We did not attempt quantitative analysis, since primarily we wanted to hear activists’ own words: their own perspectives on the situations they face, and the strategies they are exploring to confront them. The report’s findings are divided into five regional chapters focusing on conditions in what is commonly known as the global South and East—as opposed to Western Europe and North America. We chose to concentrate on those regions because activism around sexuality there faces intense pressures with far fewer resources than elsewhere. The picture this report presents is meant for multiple audiences. For activists themselves, we hope it will show contrasts and connections between work in different places. For funders who support human rights organizations, we anticipate it will reveal the range of strategies and approaches. For a broader audience, we hope it will introduce important voices in contemporary human rights.

One immediate question is that of identity. The words “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender” (LGBT) run through this report. Many activists use these terms to describe the communities they come from and the people they identify with and defend. Many do not. As used here, they are meant to be neither all-embracing nor exclusive. Some Latin American activists will speak of travesti identities, some South Asians of “third gender.” Some voices will use “queer” or “sexual minorities” as umbrella words. In other places, indigenous identities such as hijras or metis will appear. Intersex activists—who criticize the medical protocols used in legally determining biological sex in many countries, and the surgical and other procedures used to enforce them—will also be heard, and will add an “I” to the acronym.

It is important to take the diversity into account, because different identities mean different lives and needs, and different measures to address them. Men who are menaced by sodomy laws and the consequent social inequality need a different remedy than travestis subject to arrest under “public scandal” provisions. A Peruvian transgender activist says that worldwide, the “problems and agendas are different, the terms, the difficulties, the realities.” She also adds, though, that “We need a general consensus ... that permits working together.”

Although the differences between concepts and communities remain real and crucial, this work is united, broadly speaking, by rights rather than by identities: by a belief in protections for (among many other values) dignity, privacy, expression, and autonomy; a belief that all people should be both free and empowered to make decisions about their own bodies and their own sexualities. 

Defending those beliefs can cost people their lives.

The variety of experiences here is enormous. A few common threads do emerge:

a) Organizations working on sexual orientation and gender identity are still under-resourced and severely isolated. That isolation can kill.

The most important victories have been won by overcoming that isolation.   Where signal successes have been won, as in Latin America, they have sprung from negotiations and coalitions among social movements.

Integration with other human rights struggles needs to be the first priority in approaching sexual rights. We need stronger political alliances, and conceptual frameworks in which the commonalities between issues can become clear.

b) Daily, defenders of LGBT people’s rights, and sexual rights in general, face extraordinary levels of violence.  

In Jamaica, an angry crowd surrounded a church where a gay man’s funeral was being held and beat the mourners. In Kenya, one group told us matter-of-factly that its members were “attacked by an angry mob who wanted to lynch them and they had to be evacuated under tight security.”

Any support for these activists has to take into account not only the atmosphere of danger—but the chance that the support might actually, inadvertently increase it. Considering carefully how human rights advocacy can be effective in a culturally charged atmosphere of moral panic is crucial.  

c) Sexuality has become a cultural and religious battleground.

The danger comes from the weight, political importance, and emotion increasingly attached to issues of gender and sexuality. “Fundamentalism”—the impulse toward a forcible return to what are postulated as religious or cultural fundamentals—is a modern term with many definitions. One common characteristic of so-called “fundamentalisms,” proposed by Human Rights Watch elsewhere, is a “drive to seize the state, turn its spotlight on private life, and make it the agent of a newly-codified ‘tradition.’”[1] Fundamentalists try to use state power to enforce social and cultural norms they believe families and communities can no longer uphold. Some governments and politicians try to use fundamentalists in their turn, to prop up their own authority.

Fundamentalisms weave together elements from religion, nationalism, and other ideologies and traditions to invent a “cultural authenticity” that is fixed, unalterable, and monolithic—but threatened by the supposedly corrosive influences of human rights. Sexuality and the body are increasingly its chosen battlegrounds. The argument from culture devastatingly undertakes to paint LGBT people as beings who do not belong, cannot be accommodated, and—because they are intrinsically alien—cannot even be listened to or understood. 

Finding ways to respond to fundamentalisms in human rights terms is complex, and crucial. Many groups we spoke to are practicing a cultural activism of their own, seeking to reach a public through art or images.

One women’s rights activist told us that “we need voices inside” religious communities and other groups that claim monopolies of meaning. She added: “We cannot fight fundamentalism on the level of law alone. We have to struggle with them on their own ground, and that is values. We need to restore the idea that principles are not a monopoly of priests or generals; human rights are one source of ethical values, and there are others.”

d) Changing laws is still a central issue—but in many different ways. 

More than 80 countries around the world still have “sodomy laws” criminalizing consensual, adult same-sex sexual relations. We need to look both at those laws, and beyond them. Why are they there? They bolster state control over private and public life; they divide people and mark some as unequal.  However, many other laws, police powers, and state policies and practices control people’s bodies and sexualities.  

Repealing sodomy laws across Latin America in the last 20 years opened up new political space for LGBT people’s movements. Yet laws on “public scandals,” “indecency,” “wearing the clothing of the opposite sex,” and sex work are still in place that allow widespread police harassment of transgender people. Getting rid of a sodomy law and enshrining non-discrimination in South Africa produced an example of global importance. Yet it still has not created a state fully committed to equality at all levels, or capable of curtailing sexual violence.

e) Identities aren’t everything.

In many cases, it is far more productive to talk about rights issues than about identities. Talking about “gay rights” in Egypt or Iran makes no sense to most activists or to the public at large. However, talking about privacy or freedom from torture provides a frame many people can readily understand.

By contrast, in some eastern European countries where minority rights have been a key political issue for two or more decades, discussing “sexual minorities” is still a valuable terminology. No one set of terms can be applicable everywhere, and movements cannot be forced into a single framework.  

f) Differences cannot be papered over.  

Rights principles may create common ground for LGBT movements, but different approaches as well as multiple identities are still real. It is critical at all points to ask who is left out and who is included.  A transgender activist reminded us, “Funders should interrogate what groups are saying. If organizations say, ‘We work with the LGBT community,’ it is worth asking what they do for each part of that community. What do they see as its needs?”

One activist remarks that if funders “support only one type of work, usually they will be funding one type of identity over another. An organization that wants to be inclusive has different kinds of strategies for different communities. Travesti groups in Latin America work on political issues, but also do community building. Many lesbians are involved in cultural and artistic work. If you support different kinds of strategies, you will be supporting work that reaches different classes, different identities, different groups.”

Meanwhile, differences in resources create constant divisions. Work on sexuality and gender is underfunded everywhere.

Groups had recurrent and specific concerns in speaking about the resources they garner. They receive project funding, but little general support--undermining their ability to maintain staff or plan for the future. “Our funders don’t cover social benefits and retirement, even if they pay salaries,” one lesbian activist said; “they fund the production of materials but refuse to give you money to pay the electricity that will allow you to turn the computer on. If I were a funder I would understand the projects from a holistic perspective, that is, I would contemplate all the aspects that are needed the project to work.”

The predominance of funding for HIV forces groups into a health framework, and shunts them into service provision, sometimes at the expense of political advocacy. One activist told us, “The LGBT groups know from the start that they do service provision because it is needed, but also because it is a way to build toward other things.” Yet she added, “When you do service provision, there is less stress on demanding the state provide those services—whether health care or legal assistance. So before funding service provision, I would ask what possibilities there are for the groups to push the state to fulfill its responsibilities. And fund that push.”

g) Building better networks for support and communication is crucial.

The different agendas and goals of groups in far-off places interact in unforeseen ways. In one country, activists may be fighting for an end to police abuse and the threat of execution, with marriage rights far from their minds. Yet when “gay marriages” in another country flash across their TV screens, a moral panic may ensue—and their government may use the pretext to introduce new repressive measures.

There is no way to avoid such intersections. But stronger networks for steady communication among movements—in the same regions, and around the world—are badly needed, so that groups can anticipate what is coming, and plan together.

Each section of this report offers, for each region, a summary of patterns of abuse that activists identified; a survey of challenges and opportunities for action that they saw; and a review of what the movements are doing. Naturally, this is schematic. It also risks reducing all that activists do to responding to violations. It omits the parts of their work that are about affirmation, not crisis. This is a distortion probably inevitable in the human rights perspective. We nonetheless hope this will offer a small introduction to a huge, varied, and invaluable body of work, and of hopes, endeavors, and desires.

Methodology and Acknowledgements

This report was written by Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. It is based on 37 interviews (primarily by telephone) with activists from the regions concerned, the bulk of which were conducted by Arvind Narrain and Alejandra Sarda, consultants to Human Rights Watch; some interviews were also conducted by Juliana Cano Nieto, Scott Long, and Iwona Zielinska of the LGBT Rights Program. We asked a wide range of interviewees to participate, with particular attention to ensuring that the voices of lesbian and bisexual women, transgender people, sex workers, and other marginalized identities were fully represented.

The report is also based on answers to an 11-question survey which Human Rights Watch distributed, principally by e-mail, to activists and organizations in all regions, in Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. We received 63 responses. An English version of the survey questions is contained in an appendix.

While we have tried to be faithful to the responses we received, the conclusions and the organization of the material ultimately reflect our own analysis. 

The total number of respondents (questionnaire and interview) by region and country is as follows:

Sub-Saharan Africa: 13 (Burundi 1; Cameroon 1; Democratic Republic of Congo 1; Kenya 1; Nigeria 4; South Africa 4; Togo 1; Zimbabwe 1)

Middle East and North Africa: 7 (Algeria 1; Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territories 3; Iran 1; Lebanon 1; Morocco 1)

Eastern Europe and Central Asia:11 (Armenia 1; Bosnia and Herzegovina 1; Latvia 1; Poland 1; Regional 2; Romania 1; Russian Federation 1; Serbia 1; Turkey 1; Ukraine 1)

Asia and Pacific: 23 (Australia 1; Bangladesh 1; China 3; India 5; Korea 1; Nepal 1; New Zealand 1; Pakistan 1; Philippines 2; Regional 2; Singapore 2; Sri Lanka 3)

Latin America and the Caribbean: 29 (Argentina 4; Belize 1; Brazil 3; Chile 1; Colombia 1; Costa Rica 2; Dominican Republic 1; Ecuador 1; Guyana 1; Honduras 1; Jamaica 1; Mexico 1; Nicaragua 1; Paraguay 1; Peru 3; Regional 2; Venezuela 2)

Other (international, diasporic): 17

Grace Choi, John Emerson, Fitzroy Hepkins, Rita Hoekma, and Iwona Zielinska provided production assistance for the report. Human Rights Watch expresses its deep gratitude to the Arcus Foundation for its conceptual as well as financial support.