10th November 2026
To the Permanent Representatives of the 193 Missions of Member States to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City
Subject: Vote to Continue to Protect All People from Unlawful Killings!
The UN General Assembly's resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Defend the right to life of every person: the resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, eighty-first session of the General Assembly!
Excellencies,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge your delegation to vote in favour of the draft resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions as a whole, in the Third Committee and in the General Assembly plenary at the eighty-first session, and to co-sponsor it.
For decades, this resolution has reaffirmed the obligation of all States to protect the right to life, to investigate all unlawful killings promptly, thoroughly and impartially, to hold those responsible to account, and to provide reparation to victims and their families. Its protective value depends on the full text being adopted with the broadest possible cross-regional support.
The resolution is designed to protect all people, including those who are targeted because of their identities. Among those, in every region of the world, people are killed because of their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Their assailants include armed groups, relatives, neighbours, or strangers who decide they no longer deserve to live, simply because of who they are or whom they love. Many such killings are never properly recorded, and many of the perpetrators are never brought to justice.
The resolution's goal is narrow: investigate unlawful killings and hold perpetrators accountable. It creates no hierarchy among victims and no new rights. It simply asks that killings motivated by a victim's identity be looked into like any other. The right to life is fundamental and cannot be suspended under any circumstance; the fact that a person should not be unlawfully killed is not a question of a country’s tradition, religion, or culture. We are writing to also ask you to reject any proposal to remove or replace “sexual orientation and gender identity” from the UN General Assembly's Third Committee’s resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
The draft resolution also refers to journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, religious minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and victims of so-called honour killings. Removing just one category – as has been attempted repeatedly when this resolution is brought – because a state may find it politically inconvenient puts every other category at risk on the same terms.
Setting out how States should respond to unlawful killings is exactly what the General Assembly's resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions seeks to address. We, the undersigned organizations, ask you to defend the resolution’s full list of targeted groups, including its long-standing reference to sexual orientation and gender identity.
The evidence keeps accumulating. Monitoring cited by the UN's own Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions has recorded over 5,300 killings of trans and gender-diverse people since 2009: a figure that almost certainly understates the problem due to a lack of capacity or political will to gather such data.
We therefore urge you, the Member States of the United Nations, to:
- Vote in favour of the resolution as a whole, with the full list of targeted groups intact, including sexual orientation and gender identity;
- Vote against any amendment to delete or narrow the list of targeted identities, whether in Committee or in plenary; and
- Co-sponsor the resolution, if your delegation has not already done so.
Behind the list of targeted groups are real people – someone's child, a neighbour, a colleague – who were killed and whose deaths were never investigated. The question is whether anyone killed for simply being who they are will be counted, whether their killing will be investigated and those responsible prosecuted, and whether those they leave behind will receive justice and redress. We ask you to answer: yes!
Respectfully,
Outright International
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
ILGA World
International Service for Human Rights
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Also signed by 2,149 individuals and 127 organisations from 112 UN Member States.
