Scope of Interagency Influence and Authority

Over the past three days, we’ve laid out a number of key issues to be grappled with as the U.S. government meshes its foreign assistance programs with the goals laid out in the President’s December 6 memorandum and in Secretary Clinton’s speech the same day. These issues will require more than energy and thought: they will require clear and determined support from department and agency leaders, which we trust will be given.

As referenced earlier, USAID’s development assistance programs represent, in fact, only part of a larger set of assistance programs scattered across the U.S. government. The President’s memorandum references a baker’s dozen agencies that have such programs. Apart from USAID, two of our largest assistance programs were established under the Bush Administration: the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which we mentioned in yesterday’s blog, was established as a government corporation under the direction of a public/private board; PEPFAR, which operates under the Secretary of State’s oversight, oversees our international HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs. Smaller grass-roots development assistance programs are managed by the Inter-American Foundation and the African Development Foundation. Even the Pentagon carries discretionary funding that can buttress our overseas development assistance efforts.

Achieving an AIDS-Free Generation for Gay Men and Other MSM

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• Full Report
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For Immediate Release

Media Contact:
Cub Barrett, Program Communications Manager
(212) 806-1602

NEW YORK, January 18, 2012—Funding to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS consistently fails to reach programs designed to control the disease among gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM), according to a new analysis released Wednesday by amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research and the Center for Public Health and Human Rights (CPHHR) at Johns Hopkins University. The report finds that resources dedicated to addressing the epidemic among MSM are grossly insufficient, and that funding intended for this population is often diverted away from MSM-related services.

Despite Obama Administration leadership in setting bold new targets to tackle global AIDS and highlight the human rights of MSM and other sexual minorities, U.S. government aid intended to prevent and treat HIV infection among MSM continues to encounter obstacles throughout the world.

The new report, “Achieving an AIDS-Free Generation for Gay Men and Other MSM,” provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of HIV-related funding and programming for this population. Focusing on eight countries, the report finds that national governments have failed to adequately tackle the epidemic among MSM. The findings are especially dire in countries that criminalize MSM. In those settings, governments spend fewer resources on HIV-related health services for MSM, do less to track and understand the epidemic, and are more likely to repurpose donor funds intended to fight the epidemic among MSM.

Secretary Clinton “Creating an AIDS-free Generation”

Watch Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s address an audience at the National Institute of Health on working towards an AIDS-free generation. You can also read her remarks here.

Update: Read the blog posting “Secretary Clinton: Thank You, and More, Please” written by Zoe Hudson, Senior Policy Analyst with Open Society Foundations

U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) releases MSM technical guidance

May 19, Washington – Today the office of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) released a technical guidance note to assist PEPFAR administrators in developing health interventions that respond to the unique needs of men who have sex with men (MSM).  The guide finds that MSM are on average 19 times more likely to have HIV than the general population in low and middle-income countries, and that dedicated MSM programming is essential to reach this severely at-risk population. Download the guidance here.

The Council is pleased that the guidance reviews best practices in identifying and serving MSM communities.  The guidance also calls for PEPFAR support to develop legal environments that allow MSM to access HIV prevention, care and treatment in an affirming and nondiscriminatory manner that respects their human rights.  To accomplish this, the guidance explains that PEPFAR resources may be used “to establish laws, regulations and policies that support HIV prevention efforts for MSM.”  In simple terms, the guidance recognizes that laws criminalizing homosexual relations and relationships undermine our country’s large international investments, and that PEPFAR resources should also be used to support legal reform. It calls on PEPFAR implementers to offer nondiscriminatory programs and for government leaders to make legislative changes, recognizing that “country leadership . . . is needed to develop and implement, at all levels, any necessary supportive legislation, policies, and regulations.”

LGBT trends in Africa

In the context of Secretary Clinton’s recent speech on LGBT rights, where she emphatically declared that “gay rights are human rights” and welcomed four LGBT activists from Africa to the State Department, it is important to reflect on the hostile view of LGBT rights that dominates the discourse in many parts of Africa.

Follow the links to read these two recent articles on LGBT trends in Africa by two notable South African commentators.
Homosexuality and the battle for Africa’s soul

by Mark Gevisser |Mail&Guardian |http://www.mg.co.za/

LGBTI* Freedom and Equality in Africa: a Different South African Perspective

Page 4 | By Zackie Achmat | International AIDS Society | http://www.iasociety.org/

Council Representatives Join Secretary Clinton, USAID Administrator Shah to Discuss LGBT Human Rights

Secretary Clinton and USAID Administrator Shah spoke about integrating LGBT human rights with U.S. foreign policy in a State Department briefing on Tuesday, June 22.

Following keynote remarks by Secretary Clinton and Administrator Shah, Assistant Secretary Eric Schwartz, from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, discussed concerns for LGBT refugees.  The event concluded with a panel discussion by Deputy Assistant Secretary Dan Baer, from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; Mark Bromley, Chair of the Council for Global Equality; and Cary Alan Johnson, Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC).

Later that afternoon, the State Department’s Africa Bureau hosted a working roundtable with four notable human rights activists from Africa to discuss how the State Department can promote LGBT rights in the face of hostile legal and cultural environments on the African continent.

The International and the Domestic – Where the Worlds Come Together

Cecilia Chung, Shirley Tan, Sylvia Guererro, and Shannon Minter

So much of social justice work occurs in single-issue silos. Even within our own LGBT “single issue,” domestic issues in the United States and the LGBT struggles in the rest of the world rarely intersect.

Last week, the Council for Global Equality and its 19 organizational members submitted a report to the United Nations on the human rights record of the United States on a variety of LGBT issues. This submission is a rare example of international and domestic advocacy coming together to reinvigorate each other. The report was submitted for “Universal Periodic Review,” a relatively new mechanism of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, whereby every nation has its own human rights record reviewed by other states in a peer review process. The United States has signed a number of different international human rights treaties, and the UN will now assess how the United States is complying with its international human rights obligations at home based on those agreed standards. As part of the information gathering process, the Human Rights Council reviews submissions from the nonprofit field before issuing its recommendations. This process is one of the key “naming and shaming” tools that the UN has to address human rights issues around the world, and it is a mechanism that LGBT groups from around the world increasingly use to draw international attention to and seek government accountability in their struggles for equality.

As we like to say in social justice work, it’s just another “tool in the toolbox” for addressing injustice. It works better in some countries than in others. It works better for some issues than for others. But as world opinion gradually comes to accept human rights violations on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity as actual wrongs, and as international law is increasingly interpreted as being inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity, this tool is ever more useful for LGBT movements around the world – including for the United States.

The Council for Global Equality primarily focuses on U.S. foreign policy matters as they relate to sexual orientation and gender identity issues. Yet we strongly believe that attention to these fundamental issues at home can only strengthen the Obama administration’s voice in standing against homophobia and transphobia abroad. In fact our very legitimacy as a human rights leader in the world is dependent upon our cleaning up our own messes at home. That is why our submission to the UN, which focuses on hate crimes, workplace discrimination, and lack of partner and family recognition in the United States, suggests a very clear remedy for each of these three main problem areas – with most of those remedies tied to specific legislation currently pending in the U.S. Congress.

As a part of the Universal Periodic Review process, the U.S. Department of State also welcomes the perspectives of various communities and nonprofit organizations before it reports on itself to the UN. Together with other federal agencies, State Department officials have traveled the country convening “listening sessions” as part of this self-reporting process. Last month, they listened to groups in San Francisco, including a panel of amazing individuals who personally testified to the impacts of these human rights abuses on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in the United States. Those powerful and heartbreaking personal stories can be heard here (UPR LGBT Panel), and remind us that these are not esoteric issues of international treaty law – these are real issues that impact real people every day in our country.

That is why it is time for the United States to adopt the complete battery of legislation we need to grant full human rights to LGBT Americans.  We must do so to be compliant with our nation’s obligations under the international treaties and covenants to which we are party, and to live up to the values of equality, fairness, and inalienable rights that this democracy was founded upon. We are hopeful that the UN will similarly recommend that the United States rectify these issues based on an updated interpretation of our nation’s international obligations. The Council is eager to promote this unique moment, when the international and the domestic agendas for the LGBT rights movement come together in support of Global Equality.

The Council for Global Equality releases a study on the impact of PEPFAR on LGBT communities

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has saved many lives and profoundly shaped the global response to HIV. But like the proverbial Trojan Horse, it has been let into the gates with a belly full of hidden contradictions—insufficient attention to marginalized communities, earmarks for unscientific programming, and forced “pledges” that both undermine sound reproductive rights programming and challenge basic rights to freedom of expression.

In this report, Washington insider Scott Evertz takes a serious look at the politics of one of our country’s signature foreign assistance programs. Scott is the former director of President George W. Bush’s Office of National AIDS Policy and an openly gay Republican, and his analysis reflects a degree of experience and honesty that is too often obscured by the rigid ideology and partisan policymaking that have—up until now—been the cornerstones of PEPFAR and the Bush administration’s bilateral funding strategy.

Read the complete report here.

How Ideology Trumped Science: Why PEPFAR has Failed to Meet its Potential

Next week, the Center for American Progress will publish a scathing critique of how PEPFAR – the Bush Administration’s signature initiative to combat the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS in Africa – ignored by design the HIV prevention needs of LGBT communities.

“How Ideology Trumped Science: Why PEPFAR has Failed to Meet its Potential” is written by Scott Evertz, a Bush Administration appointee. The Council for Global Equality sponsored Evertz’ refreshingly honest research, the thrust of which is to advocate a more inclusive, science-based program that ultimately will make more effective use of taxpayer dollars.

PEPFAR is rightly praised for having provided anti-retroviral medicines to some 2.1 million people who otherwise may have lacked recourse to them. It has made HIV testing and counseling available to millions more, while providing care to orphans and others with little means to provide for themselves. But PEPFAR’s assistance pipelines largely have bypassed LGBT communities, leaving gaping holes in the logic of efforts to stem the disease.

At a pre-holiday preview of his report, Evertz demurred on whether PEPFAR’s exclusion of LGBT needs was a deliberate reflection of anti-gay bias. But PEPFAR’s emphasis of abstinence until marriage amounts to a built-in exclusion of gays and lesbians, for whom marriage isn’t presently an option. Indeed, only negligible funding has been targeted at prevention outreach to men who have sex with men – a population that remains, at least partly of consequence, highly vulnerable to HIV infection.

Dogma-over-science has undermined PEPFAR’s effectiveness in other ways as well. PEPFAR grantees must explicitly oppose prostitution – thereby undercutting outreach to commercial sex workers, a major avenue of HIV infection. Averting needle exchange programs for injecting drug users has torn another hole in PEPFAR’s impact. And by giving overriding primacy to “abstinence” and “be faithful” messages, with little attention to correct condom usage, PEPFAR programs have reduced sex education to an asterisk.

The most detailed and disturbing portions of Evertz’ report relate to how PEPFAR may have contributed inadvertently to the unraveling of Uganda’s previously successful fight against HIV/AIDS. The Ugandan Government readily adopted PEPFAR’s de-emphasis of condoms and related sex education as effective means of HIV prevention. Evertz also reveals tell-tale signs that some faith-based PEPFAR sub-grantees may have helped nurture the anti-gay climate in Uganda that has spawned a horribly homophobic draft law that may be put to a vote in the coming days. Those of us of the Christian faith should be first to speak out against this subversion of religion to justify state-sponsored homophobic hate, imprisonment, and even death.

Larger questions fleetingly emerge, without answer, from Evertz’ work. For example, how could the UN Security Council not have recognized until the year 2000 – almost 20 years into this health crisis – the global security repercussions of the spread of HIV/AIDS? But the most disturbing question is this: how were those who ran PEPFAR allowed to break the wall of public policy separation our Founding Fathers rightly erected between church and state – thereby infusing a ground-breaking public health program, and indeed America’s national foreign policy interests, with sectarian dogma?

This is less a question for historians to dissect, or even for the previous Administration to defend, than one that public policy experts must ensure can never rightly be asked again.

View the panel discussion about this report held on December 15, 2009 at the Center for American Progress:

How Ideology Trumped Science

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Human Rights Day

Human Rights Day: Today, December 10, is UN “Human Rights Day.” The date marks the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the United Nations. With Eleanor Roosevelt’s leadership, the UDHR gave birth to the modern human rights movement. It is a document that reflects America’s founding values of liberty, justice and opportunity for all. And so it is also fitting that President Obama is in Norway today accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his support for multilateral institutions in advancing peace, security and human rights.

One of this year’s leading human rights challenges within the United Nations has been the ongoing effort of many governments, the United States included, to affirm that LGBT rights are human rights. The Council for Global Equality is pleased that President Obama and Secretary Clinton have embraced this modern human rights struggle.

In her Senate confirmation, Secretary Clinton highlighted the President’s own commitment to human rights, emphasizing that “President-Elect Obama said during the campaign that human rights violations based on sexual orientation must be ‘part and parcel of any conversations we have about human rights.’ If confirmed, I will work to ensure that our country stands on principle against human rights abuse or prejudice of any kind.” Under the Secretary’s leadership, LGBT rights are now “part and parcel” of all of our human rights conversations. But dialogue alone is not enough; there is far more to accomplish, both at home and abroad.

At the United Nations last December, 66 countries submitted a ground-breaking statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity. The statement recognizes that LGBT rights are indeed human rights and calls on all countries to decriminalize consensual homosexual relations and protect the rights of LGBT individuals. Unfortunately senior Bush officials refused to join the statement, a decision that left the United States out of step with our neighbors and as one of the only countries in the entire “Western Group” that failed to sign. In March 2009, the Obama Administration reversed course and announced full U.S. support for this important new human rights campaign. President Obama’s decision came just a few weeks after the U.S. State Department released an annual report on human rights that was the most comprehensive to date on sexual orientation and gender identity concerns, pointing to a growing pattern of human rights abuse directed against LGBT people around the world.

But how exactly do we turn those commitments, those human rights “conversations,” into meaningful protection? We must begin by moving beyond a reporting agenda, or even a conversation-focused agenda, to adopt a new human rights protection agenda.  And nowhere is that challenge more evident than in Uganda today. The Ugandan parliament is currently considering a bill that is so homophobic on its face that its provisions sound implausible to even the most conservative ear. As such, the bill in Uganda’s parliament, which includes a death penalty provision and criminalizes those who fail to report suspected homosexuals to the authorities, is quickly becoming a modern human rights Rubicon; its passage would lay bare the frailty of the UDHR’s revolutionary call for human rights and dignity for all.

Joining many other nations around the world, the United States must make it absolutely clear to Uganda that the passage of the bill would substantially impact our bilateral relationship and our health investments in that country. This is crucial, because opposition to this bill is testing our global capacity to protect the rights of a highly demonized minority in a politically charged context. So far we are losing.

The State Department, in close coordination with the U.S. Embassy in Uganda, is saying all of the right things. But unfortunately, despite our annual U.S. investment of nearly $300 million to support HIV prevention care and treatment in Uganda, we do not seem to be having much influence in scuttling a proposal that would undermine our massive health expenditure by criminalizing HIV outreach to a highly vulnerable community. The bill’s passage is increasingly likely. If it passes, it would jeopardize our country’s future health investments, insult our new President’s human rights commitments and diminish our country’s leadership.

On this Human Rights Day, the world’s leaders are focused on President Obama’s speech in Norway. But the question is this: Will he use his global stature and the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize to back up those words? Will he honor his commitments to human rights for all, including the world’s most vulnerable minority communities? That answer may soon become evident in Uganda.

For more information on Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality” bill and the Council’s work to expose its human rights implications, visit www.GlobalEquality.org.