Two marchers in Taiwan's annual LGBT Pride March in Taipei City in this picture dated 2013 affirm that "I am proud to be gay; I'm not a sex refugee!" United Nations independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz exsaid levels of violence towards and the lack of recognition of gender identities, especially transgender people, stating that the situation is “disastrous.” Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 2018 (IPS)

Transgender and gender-diverse people are facing unprecedented levels of violence and discrimination around the world and states must act to ensure they are not left behind, said a United Nations rights expert.

In a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly, U.N. Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz expressed concern over the levels of violence towards and the lack of recognition of gender identities, especially transgender people, stating that the situation is “disastrous.”

“These persons are suffering levels of violence and discrimination that are offensive to human conscience,” he said during a press conference.

Madrigal-Borloz noted that 71 countries criminalise sexual orientation and gender identity diversity. Of them, some 20 countries criminalise certain activities of forms of gender identity.

Alongside persistent discrimination, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities continue to be subject to violence simply because of their identities.

In the United States, at least 22 transgender people have been killed so far in 2018, many of them women of colour.

Most recently, 31-year-old Ciara Minaj Carter Frazier was stabbed to death in Chicago. Her death puts this year on track to match, if not surpass, the 28 murders of transgender people in 2017.

Brazil has one of the world’s highest rates of LGBT-targeted violence as 2017 saw a record 445 reports of murders of LGBT Brazilians. Among them is Dandara dos Santos, a transgender woman who was tortured, beaten, and shot in northeastern Brazil.

Many fear that such violence will only get worse under the looming presidency of Jair Bolsonaro who has said homosexuality is “an affront to the family structure” and that it can be cured with violence.

“Clearly, criminalisation is creating a situation where persons are not only not protected, but actively persecuted on the basis of their gender identity,” Madrigal-Borloz said.

He also noted that LGBT communities are further marginalised as they are denied access to services such as education, health, and housing.

Approximately one in five transgender individuals have reported being homeless during their lifetime in the U.S., and an estimated 20-40 percent of homeless youth are LGBT.

Madrigal-Borloz said that this situation is partly attributed to the lack of legal recognition of gender identities.

“The measures adopted to ensure that there is conformity between their self identified gender and the legal recognition are of fundamental importance to prevent violence and discrimination,” he said.

According to a leaked memo obtained the New York Times, the Trump Administration is pushing federal agencies to narrow the definition of sex “on a biological basis” under Title IX—a civil rights law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

It could be enforced in a way that allows discrimination against transgender people in access to employment, health, school, and housing.

The U.N. delegation to the U.N. has also reportedly been seeking to remove references to “gender” in U.N. documents, another move signalling the government’s rollback of protections and recognition of transgender people.

Similar actions can be seen around the world, including in Hungary where prime minister Viktor Orban banned gender studies programs at universities.

“The government’s standpoint is that people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially constructed genders rather than biological sexes,” a spokesperson for the prime minister said.

However, the has been some progress, said Madrigal-Borloz, whose report highlighted some of the international community’s best practices on discrimination and violence against LGBT communities.

For instance, Uruguay, in recognition of diverse gender identities and the obstacles that transgender people face in exercising their rights under the law, implemented a program designed to help transgender people navigate the law as well as access social security programs and employment opportunities.

In New Zealand, people can choose to have their gender in their passport marked as male, female or a third category based solely on self-determined identity. This also applies to children under the age of 18.

“There is a historical recognition of the fact that a diversity of gender identities have been recognised in all cultures and traditions around the world and that the outlawing or stigmatising surrounding certain gender expressions have more the result of certain processes—in some cases colonial domination and in some cases normalisation based on certain conceptions of gender,” Madrigal-Borloz said.

“But I do believe that there is enough evidence that in longstanding cultural and societal tradition, gender diversity has played a role in all corners of the world,” he added, highlighting the need for the legal recognition of gender identity.

The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also recently said that the organisation must “redouble” efforts to end violations against LGBT communities around the world.

“As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, let me underscore that the United Nations will never give up the fight until everyone can live free and equal in dignity and rights,” he said.

While the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), globally adopted in 2016, do not explicitly mention LGBT communities, they still highlight the need to include everyone without discrimination.

“There is a situation that requires immediate and prompt action of the state to actually make sure that these persons are not left behind in the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals,” Madrigal-Borloz said.

Advocates hope a historic U.N. Security Council meeting on LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) rights could bring greater equality. Credit: Bigstock

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 24 2015 (IPS)

The U.N. Security Council (UNSC), whose primary mandate is the maintenance of international peace and security, has occasionally digressed to discuss global issues such as climate change and HIV/AIDS.

But in a historic first, and at a closed-door meeting co-hosted by the United States and Chile, the UNSC took up the issue of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) rights – providing a platform for an Iraqi and a Syrian, both of whom escaped persecution by the radical Islamic State (IS) purely for their sexual orientation.

“In a world where there's homophobia and transphobia, the U.N. should lead by example." -- Hyung Hak Nam, President of UN-GLOBE, which represents lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) staff fighting for equality and non-discrimination in the U.N. system
The meeting took place Monday, under what is called the “Arria-formula”, named after Ambassador Diego Arria of Venezuela who initiated the practice back in 1992.

Described as “informal and confidential gatherings”, they enable Security Council members to have a frank and private exchange of views – but with no official commitments.

Critical of this restricted political dialogue, Boris Dittrich, advocacy director of the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS that Monday’s meeting was clearly “not an official U.N. Security Council meeting.”

Security Council members are not obliged to attend or participate in these meetings, he pointed out. “Having said that, I think it is interesting” this debate was held, Dittrich added.

He said testimony given by people who experienced the IS attacks on human rights will draw attention to the atrocities perpetrated by IS against gay men – or men who are perceived to be gay.

“The debate will not end in the adoption of a UNSC resolution. For LGBT people in Iraq and Syria the importance of the debate lies in changes on the ground,” he argued.

“Will the debate lead to less human rights abuses against LGBT people? Or will heightened attention at the U.N. level lead to more targeted killings by IS?” he asked.

“I don’t have the answer, but I will be interested to hear what the panelists have to say about that,” said Dittrich.

He said the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) should take care that its staff members on the ground in Turkey and other countries, where LGBT asylum seekers flee to, will be sensitized to address the issue of homosexuality in a speedy and serious manner.

Too often, he said, HRW hears stories of asylum seekers who flee persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, that their issues are ignored.

“This is something the U.N. could actually do. It would be a great outcome of the debate,” he noted.

Asked about the UNSC digression into non-security issues, Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former U.N. Under-Secretary-General and High Representative, told IPS: “Well, I believe, maintenance of international peace and security depends on many interrelated things and issues.”

It is therefore “absolutely unrealistic, impractical and irresponsible” to categorize any issue as having no implications for maintenance of peace and security, he said.

“I recall in the past, the Security Council has considered HIV/AIDS, climate change and serious violations of human rights.

“I also remember the Council issuing an agreed statement on the floods in Mozambique because the torrential flood water washed away many landmines from their original positions which were mapped by U.N. for demining,” said Chowdhury, who presided over Security Council meetings when he was the Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the United Nations.

“Even when the core concept which ultimately became UNSC resolution 1325 was introduced to recognize women’s equality of participation at all decision-making levels during my Presidency of the Security Council in March 2000, I was criticized for overloading the Council agenda by introducing a ‘soft issue’ in the area of international peace and security and was pressurized not to push for a resolution on the issue, particularly by its permanent members,” Chowdhury said.

Of the 15 members in the UNSC, five are permanent (the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia) and 10 are non-permanent members elected for two-year terms on the basis of geographical rotation.

For the last 70 years, said Chowdhury, the Council has narrowly focused on state security and military strategies – not on human security, as the complexity of today’s global situation requires.

“This perspective has to change if the Council wants to be meaningfully effective in its decisions and actions,” he added.

Hyung Hak Nam, President of UN-GLOBE, which represents lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) staff fighting for equality and non-discrimination in the U.N. system and its peacekeeping operations, told IPS, “When I read reports of the horrible violence perpetrated by the Islamic State against LGBTI individuals, I think of the victims.”

“[But] I also think of the U.N. offices or missions in these countries, and whether or not they are prepared to handle such cases. And I think of LGBTI staff working in these countries and whether they feel safe and feel their U.N. offices would be able to protect them,” he said.

There’s a long way to go before the U.N. mainstreams LGBTI issues into the way it operates, including in its employment policies, he added.

“I do hope the U.N. will move towards becoming a showcase for others of what full equality and inclusion for all, including LGBTI staff, looks like.”

“In a world where there’s homophobia and transphobia, the U.N. should lead by example,” he declared.

Javier El-Hage, chief legal officer at the Human Rights Foundation, told IPS his Foundation applauds UNSC member states Chile and the United States for their initiative to hold an ‘Arria-formula meeting’ highlighting the plight of LGBT people in territories currently controlled by IS (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS).

ISIS, a terrorist organization currently committing numerous crimes against humanity and perpetrating a genocide against the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq and Syria, has already been condemned by the council repeatedly, he pointed out.

So, Chile and the U.S. are now taking the opportunity to highlight ISIS’s barbaric crimes against a particular minority that is deliberately ignored or discriminated against by several authoritarian governments that sit on the U.N. Security Council, El-Hage said.

Many U.N. Security Council permanent and non-permanent member states are themselves notorious for either repressing LGBT people domestically or blocking LGBT rights advocacy internationally, he noted.

Putin’s Russia, for example, bans the discussion of LGBT rights in the public sphere as “gay propaganda,” while China usually teams up with dictatorships at the U.N. to exclude from the text of U.N. resolutions language that recognizes LGBT people as a minority especially vulnerable to, for example, extrajudicial executions.

Similarly discriminatory of LGBT people in their countries are non-permanent members Chad, Angola, Nigeria, and Malaysia, he added.

“Thanks to the symbolic move by the U.S. and Chile, today they are all being forced to sit through a meeting to address an issue that they would rather avoid,” he declared.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Members of the Women’s Network for Unity in Cambodia are fighting for LGBT rights, land rights, peasant rights and human rights. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
PHNOM PENH, Dec 13 2012 (IPS)

For a brief moment last month, mainstream international media turned the spotlight on Cambodia, one of the world’s 48 least developed countries (LDCs), as a high-level visit from U.S. President Barack Obama and the annual summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) gave this country of 14.3 million people a glamorous edge.

The burst of international attention also united many grassroots groups and organisations, which came together under an umbrella called the ASEAN People’s Grassroots Assembly (APGA) – comprised of farmers, fisherfolk, labour unions and other rights groups – to protest the limits of the recently adopted regional human rights declaration, and expose grave rights violations in Cambodia.

The difference is that while international scrutiny and curiosity quickly faded, the activists’ work –against a backdrop of accelerating regional cooperation between ASEAN’s ten member states – is only just beginning.

According to Pisely Ly, a Cambodian legal activist, the most marginalised members of society are just as badly off as they were before Cambodia hosted the annual ASEAN gathering in mid-November.

Sex workers and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, for example, have few protections under the law.

Add to this the intersecting issues of widespread land evictions, loss of livelihoods, women supporting rural families, trafficking and sex work and the grassroots movement here is faced with a long road ahead, she said.

ASEAN integration 2015

Plans to achieve full integration of the 10 ASEAN economies by 2015 also have Cambodian activists on edge.

If the integration roadmap goes according to schedule, member states will experience increased regional trade and investment in the next two years, which AGPA members fear will exacerbate the disastrous impacts of Cambodia’s land policies. Already the government has signed off over 11,000 acres of arable land to various international investors.

The World Policy Institute reported that Chinese investments in Cambodia have spiked since the China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement was inked in January 2010, and now comprise 20 percent of total foreign investment in the country.

Vietnam’s investments have grown as well, primarily in rubber plantations.

The consequences of these investments, which often lead to displacement, are grave and far-reaching.

Earlier this month Member of Parliament Mu Sochua visited a community displaced by the Ly Young Phat palm sugar plantation land concession.

“One of the victims of land grabs was dying when we were there. She lost everything to Ly Young Phat. She was pregnant and hunger pushed her to seek food in the forest. She was poisoned by the mushrooms she found…this is an extreme case of the end result of land concessions,” Sochua told IPS.

The New York Times reported earlier this year, “One major problem is the widespread grant of so-called Economic Land Concessions (E.L.C.). Under Cambodia’s 2001 Land Law, the government is allowed to make use of all “private state land” and lease up to about 25,000 acres to a company for as many as 99 years. The government has carved out some of the country’s best land one bit at a time, evicting many poor people for the commercial benefit of a few.”

“We can (no longer) utilise our land to grow food,” said Pen Sothary, a member of the Women’s Network for Unity (WNU) – a 6,400-member collective of sex workers, LGBT people and garment workers based here in Cambodia’s capital, echoing the sentiments expressed during a recent collaboration between the WNU and the AGPA.

Between 2003 and 2008, land concessions in Cambodia affected a quarter of a million people, according to the Cambodian League for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights (LICADHO).

Analysts believe a new draft law for 2012 will further weaken peasants’ ownership of their land.

Meanwhile, the ASEAN People’s Forum (APF), which represents civil society within the region, recently released a statement expressing concerns from farmers, fisher folk, sex workers and LGBT people that regional integration could also worsen the situation in Cambodia.

Rural-urban migration fuels sex trade

Pech Sokchea, a transgender woman and member of the WNU, told IPS that these land concessions have resulted in massive evictions and loss of livelihoods.

The problem is particularly severe in a country where 70 percent of the population are subsistence farmers.

To avoid going hungry evictees “often become migrant workers and are at risk of being trafficked”, Sokchea told IPS.

Researcher Melissa Ditmore wrote in a recent WNU report, “High-interest loans lead to landlessness among rural people, and consequently to urban migration.”  Ditmore also found that farmers lose out in credit schemes, and sometimes borrow at a 500 percent interest rate to buy seed. When crops fail, they often lose their land and their homes.

The International Labor Organisation (ILO) has documented rural to urban migration, starting from the mid-1990s, as a trend among women seeking work in garment factories in cities, where they typically earn a monthly salary of no more than 60 dollars a month.

To supplement this meagre income, many also seek part-time work in the ‘entertainment’ industry, which consists of beer gardens, karaoke bars and massage parlors, often serving as fronts for sex work. Back in 2009, the ILO estimated the number of entertainment workers to be over 21,000 in Phnom Penh alone.

Entertainers’ salaries can be as low as 35 dollars a month, while the going rate for sex work is about 25 dollars per night. This wage difference is crucial for people struggling to make ends meet in an economy that calls for a minimum monthly income of 177 dollars. Most women also remit a large portion of their earnings to extended family members still living in the countryside, according to the SOMO research organisation.

Cambodian migrant workers who move around within the region in search of better work may find higher wages outside the country, but no protection for their rights as labourers.

Young Cambodian women working as maids in Malaysia have been subjected to physical and sexual abuse by employers due to scant protection of their rights. “Some women do not get paid and return empty-handed,” Keo Tha, an elected secretary for the WNU, explained to IPS.

“Some are cheated and turn to sex work (in order to survive),” she added. “Some become HIV positive and have no access to healthcare and medicine.” The problem is made worse by the fact that the commercial sex trade is illegal and unregulated.

WNU members are particularly concerned about the impact of the ‘loophole’ in the new ASEAN rights framework, which allows states to adhere to internationally accepted human rights standards only insofar as they do not trample on “cultural and religious” norms in each respective country.

This caveat gives the green light to governments to ignore the rights of, for example, LGBT people, Ly told IPS. Still, she has faith that grassroots activists can come together to unite the many connected issues in the country.

“We believe the people’s voice is very powerful,” Ly added.

(END)