Over the past two years, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have pushed for “sexual and reproductive health and rights” to be included in the U.N. post-2015 agenda. This wording has generally been understood to represent a push for abortion rights. But it was not openly recognized until Friday, at the Stakeholder Forum in New York, that this wording also included LGBTQ rights (the moderator, Alanieta Vakatale of the Pacific Islands Association, added the Q).
The speaker was Ambassador Peter Wilson, deputy permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations. His statement was in response to a question from a representative of the International Gay and Human Rights Commission, over the problems that could occur from disaggregated data that keep track of members of the LGBT community and could lead to “criminalization, stigma and stereotypes in our communities.”
“I think this is clearly a really important question,” said Wilson. “My country is deeply, deeply committed to making sure that a rights-based approach is part of this. The way we are feeding that into the post-2015 agenda is on sexual and reproductive health and rights.”
Other speakers also focused on the need to separate sexual health and rights. Irene Kagoya, from Akina Mama Wa Afrika and representing the Women’s Major Group, claimed the right to “control our own bodies” and the need for “full realization of sexual rights.” She urged the U.N. to promote comprehensive sexuality education — to allow young people to make their own decisions.
“We would also like to emphasize that sexual and reproductive rights are human rights,” Kagoya said. “If we cannot control our own bodies, sexualities and fertilities, we cannot exercise any of our other civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights.”
Kagoya's comments echoed a statement produced in November 2014 at the Asia Pacific Beijing+20 Civil Society Forum. This meeting was in preparation for the official Beijing+20 meetings to be held at the U.N. in March, commemorating the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action created in 1995.
The Asia Pacific document said that “women with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are the most likely to experience marginalisation and a denial of their human rights” and “The single greatest barrier to the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action is the lack of binding, meaningful accountability mechanisms.”
Interestingly, the accountability mechanisms brought up this subject at the Stakeholder Forum, as the LGBT community was opposed to having LGBT members identified, for fear of creating “criminalization, stigma and stereotypes.”
The Asia Pacific Forum also requested governments to “review and remove laws and policies that discriminate and/or criminalize sex workers and people who use drugs.”
On the reproductive side of the issues, the Asia Pacific Forum requested governments to provide “reproductive health information and services, including safe and legal abortion, provided through the public sector, without any form of stigma, discrimination, coercion or violence.”
Of note is that the moderator of this session of the Stakeholder Forum was from the Pacific Islands Association. Thus, the presentation made by Kagoya is bringing forward the goals of the Asia Pacific Forum to the U.N. meetings on the post-2015 agenda.
I attended this Stakeholder Forum. It would be unfair to represent that the sexual issues were the major topics of discussion. Every conceivable want in the world was requested to be included in the post-2015 agenda. I will write another article in upcoming days outlining more of the issues promoted during this forum and the upcoming negotiations by government delegates (held Monday through Wednesday).
As a forum participant, I was given the opportunity to ask a question. I noted that the Secretary-General’s Synthesis Report only mentioned family twice, and both times it was only referring to the “global family.” I concluded with the following statement:
“If we want to make sure that ‘no one is left behind,’ we need to focus on the family, and how the family can help achieve these goals. Our organization wrote a book on how to achieve the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) through effective use of the family, how to train the extended family to help overcome the problems of maternal health and how to overcome child mortality, and we would like to see more of a focus on that basic grass-roots level of society and how they can help achieve these goals.”
Susan Roylance is the International Policy and Social Development Coordinator for the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society.