Global Equality Today: March 2024

As we write here in Washington, D.C., spring has arrived. Clocks have sprung forward, cherry blossoms have just peaked, and pollen allergies are back with a vengeance.

Temperatures aren’t the only thing heating up, though. While it’s only March, we’re effectively moving onto the general election season months before the summer conventions following barely contested primary races in both major parties.

Any election year offers distinct advocacy challenges, but never have we seen one so fraught as this year, where Congress is paralyzed by the extraordinary dysfunction within the House Republican majority. One example of the extremist-driven paralysis comes in the continuing failure to pass a five-year “clean” reauthorization of PEPFAR, despite the program’s extraordinary success and its twenty-year record of bipartisan support. Fortunately, Congress did just approve a clean, one-year extension of the program in its late-night budget deal. That’s not ideal for program management, but we did manage to keep some dangerous riders out of PEPFAR that would have undermined its effectiveness — and its ability to serve LGBTQI+ communities abroad. 

But we continue to work with our allies in the executive branch and on the Hill to promote LGBTQI+ human rights wherever possible. Just this month, CGE members successfully lobbied Congressional allies to strip more than 50 anti-LGBTQI+ riders from the Appropriations bill. The anti-LGBTQI+ forces in Congress did manage to attach one unfortunate provision that is intended to prevent embassies from flying Pride flags during Pride celebrations overseas. But CGE member Human Rights Campaign summed up the situation well, noting in a press release that it was one of the least-harmful of all of the anti-LGBTQI+ provisions and that it does not in any way prevent embassies from actually celebrating Pride.

Indeed, with this new limitation, we challenge the majority of U.S. embassies that do celebrate Pride around the world to rethink their celebrations to move beyond flag-waving events to gatherings designed to honor and support the community in creative new ways. For its part, a White House statement promised to work with Congress to repeal the policy. CGE and our members will remain vigilant, as no doubt, hard-right members of Congress will continue to try inserting anti-LGBTQI+ poison pills into other bills as this increasingly dysfunctional Congress wraps up its pre-election agenda.

PROJECT 2025, LGBTQI+ HUMAN RIGHTS, AND THE AUTHORITARIAN THREAT

It is no exaggeration to say that democracy is on the ballot in 2024, in the United States and around the world. Two billion people — about half of the world’s adult population — will go to the polls this year. Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist from the Philippines and author of How To Stand Up to a Dictator, has warned that in all likelihood, “2024 will be the year that democracy falls off the cliff.”

Very dramatic words to be sure, but in Indonesia, a former general once banned from the United States for alleged human rights abuses has already won the February presidential election. In Russia, Vladimir Putin used sham polls to further tighten his grasp on power. In India, Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister, is widely expected to win a third term in this spring’s elections. Other key elections coming this year include those taking place in Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Belgium, Ghana, the European Union, and, potentially, the United Kingdom.

In an op-ed last month, Maria Sjödin, Executive Director of Outright, one of CGE’s member organizations, outlined the implications of these elections for LGBTQI+ people, noting the weaponization of homophobia and transphobia in the campaigns in Russia, Ghana, and South Africa, among other countries.

This weaponization is, of course, front and center in this year’s U.S. presidential, Congressional, and local elections. At CGE, we are working hard to draw attention to Project 2025.

If you haven’t yet heard, Project 2025 is what the Heritage Foundation and its partners are innocuously pitching as “the plan for the next conservative President” of the United States. But as our colleagues at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism explain far more accurately, “Project 2025 is an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”

We strongly encourage you to read our blog on Project 2025, and to share it, along with our fact sheet on the particular anti-LGBTQI+ planks of the plan. Additionally, check out Beirne Roose-Snyder, CGE’s Senior Policy Fellow, talking about Project 2025 on the rePROs Fight Back podcast.

Beyond demonizing LGBTQI+ people and looking to eliminate the fundamental human rights of the community, Project 2025 takes aim at numerous rights, populations, programs, and principles: sexual and reproductive health and rights, racial equity, climate justice and environmental policy, public education, so-called “wokeness” in the military, separation of church and state, and much more.

Let’s not mince words: Project 2025’s targeting of LGBTQI+ people and of sexual and reproductive health and rights is inseparable from its overarching goal of dismantling democracy and capturing the U.S. federal government. It is no exaggeration to describe Project 2025’s mandate as eliminationist, as it seeks to erase LGBTQI+ people from public life, from social protections, and from democratic citizenship altogether.

The Republican House majority has certainly demonstrated its willingness to pursue such an eliminationist agenda, as have anti-LGBTQI+ state legislators around the country. The one partial victory they achieved in the appropriations battle was enacting a ban on flying the rainbow flag on the exterior of U.S. embassies — though, as already noted, that measure does not limit embassies organizing Pride events or otherwise supporting in-country LGBTQI+ communities. But this provision also speaks to how authoritarians, at home and around the globe, have weaponized the rainbow flag in their war on democracy and the rule of law.

Over the months to come, we’ll have much, much more to say about Project 2025 and about the highly coordinated, very well-funded anti-rights movement that is targeting LGBTQI+ rights as a wedge for its broader assault on democracy, civil society, and human rights.

LGBTQI+ REFUGEES & ASYLUM SEEKERS

In February, House Republicans defeated the border security deal negotiated between the White House and a bipartisan group of Senators. While there were certainly some positive measures in the deal, from increased staffing to process asylum claims to urgently needed assistance for Ukraine, and while House Republicans rejected the deal for not being sufficiently anti-immigrant, we expressed our fundamental opposition to any changes to immigration policy that would undermine the basic human right to seek asylum and that certainly would be disastrous for LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers.

We want to flag two related pieces from CGE members. First, in an op-ed in The Advocate, Immigration Equality issued its own powerful rebuke to the deal, explaining why it would be lethal for LGBTQI+ asylum seekers. Second, Human Rights First reported on a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, sharing the stories of refugees directly harmed by U.S. policies, including that of an LGBTQ+ refugee from Ghana terrified of being forced to return — and this was even before the passage of the horrific anti-LGBTQI+ law by the Ghanaian Parliament in late February.

LGBTQI+ HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER THREAT AROUND THE WORLD

Ghana is one of all too many countries where homophobic and transphobic politicians, backed by anti-rights actors from the United States, are pushing discriminatory, hate-fueled legislation to deny even the most basic rights of citizenship to LGBTQI+ people. These laws, whether proposed or actually passed and enacted, all increase anti-LGBTQI+ stigma and violence.

CGE is coordinating closely with activists in Ghana urging President Akufo-Addo to veto the draconian bill passed by Parliament in February; with movement leaders in Uganda petitioning for the Supreme Court there to overturn last year’s Anti-Homosexuality Act; and with advocates in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa working hard to prevent passage of similar bills in their own country.

We also continue to lobby our partners in the U.S. government, at the World Bank, and in like-minded countries to keep up the pressure and not let homophobic and transphobic politicians think they can get away with restricting the fundamental human rights of a vulnerable community. CGE especially appreciates the termination of Uganda’s AGOA status and calls for Ghana’s status to be revoked as well should the new law go into effect. We were also very pleased to see the Treasury Department levy sanctions against the director of Uganda’s prison system:

“Members of vulnerable groups, including government critics and members of Uganda’s LGBTQI+ community, have been beaten and held without access to legal counsel; for example, in a 2020 case, the UPS [Uganda Prisons Systems] denied a group of LGBTQI+ persons access to their lawyers and members of the group reportedly endured physical abuse, including a forced anal examination and scalding.”

This is only the second-known use of Global Magnitsky Act sanctions against a perpetrator for committing human rights violations against LGBTQI+ people, a strategy CGE has long urged Treasury to deploy. We likewise applaud the denial of a visa to Ugandan MP Sarah Opendi (and apparently to many other Ugandan MPs), who called for the castration of gay men and who has been one of the leading supporters of the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

For a deeper dive into the homophobic and transphobic campaigns across the Continent, we encourage you to read our think piece, “Ubuntu for LGBTQI+ Africans,” which argues:

The proliferation of anti-LGBTQI+ laws in Africa constitutes a perilous trend that imperils the lives and freedoms of countless individuals, placing the continent at a disadvantage. These laws contravene fundamental human rights principles, while also undermining democracy and the rule of law. It is imperative that African governments take decisive action to repeal these harmful and discriminatory laws while actively promoting equality and human rights for all.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to push the template for authoritarian regimes using eliminationist tactics as a tool promote the broader suppression of dissent and independent civil society. Building upon the 2013 and 2022 so-called “propaganda” laws, the Russian Supreme Court declared “the international LGBT movement” to be “an extremist organization,” thus conflating any pro-LGBTQI+ statements with terrorism. Already, one woman has been jailed for wearing rainbow earrings under the new court ruling, and earlier in March, two employees of a gay bar were charged with “extremism” for organizing and hosting drag shows. CGE is continuing to partner with Russian LGBTQI+ activists to draw attention to the crisis facing the country’s queer community, and we are urging U.S. government partners to use all tools possible to prevent copycat legislation in other countries as was the case for the “propaganda” laws.

In Central Asia, the Biden Administration is seeking to develop closer security partnerships and economic relationships with the five former Soviet republics strategically located between Russia, China, and Afghanistan. As it does so, we continue to press our Administration partners to insist that improving the abysmal situation for LGBTQI+ people and for human rights and civil society more broadly in Central Asia must go hand-in-hand with closer trade ties.

THE WAR IN GAZA AND ISRAEL

More than five months since the catastrophic attacks of October 7^th, CGE continues to mourn the pain and suffering from those brutally victimized by Hamas, as well as the Palestinian civilians who have been harmed and killed in the Israeli response. We call out all attacks on civilian populations as grave violations of human rights and humanitarian law.  

We further call on the U.S. government to support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel, and to support sufficient and unhindered humanitarian corridors to Gaza to prevent greater harm to civilians. We urge the United States to ensure that U.S. military and financial support are not used for the collective, retaliatory punishment of Palestinians, including journalists, children, and other vulnerable groups. We also call on the U.S. government to work for a negotiated release of all the hostages currently in Gaza as an immediate priority. 

CGE Co-Chair Julie Dorf published her own personal reflections on the war, having grown up in a “staunchly Zionist environment,” visiting Israel and Palestine numerous times, and wrestling over the years with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, pinkwashing, war and oppression, and what justice can look like. We likewise encourage you to share her essay and offer your own observations.

EMBASSY GUIDE

In our fall 2023 newsletter, we spotlighted the updated and expanded edition of CGE’s Accessing U.S. Embassies: A Guide for LGBTQI+ Human Rights Defenders, our resource for helping international partners understand and access U.S. embassies and missions and build and maintain productive working relationships with U.S. diplomatic and development staff around the world. This guide, originally released in English in June, is now also available in Spanish, French, and Arabic as well.

CELEBRATING OUR PARTNERS

To wind down on a happy note: we’ve just celebrated some amazing LBTQ+ activists for International Women’s Day, and we’re preparing to recognize equally remarkable trans and nonbinary advocates for Transgender Day of Visibility later this week.

While the forces pitted against equality and human rights for LGBTQI+ communities are growing stronger and more connected in many regions of the world, we also saw two heartwarming victories for marriage equality in Japan earlier this month. And as CGE member organization Amnesty International noted, “[b]y recognizing that the government’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, these rulings make clear that such discrimination has no place in Japanese society.” Equality, too, is on the march and discrimination has no place in any society, we just have to remember to look for it and celebrate it, even as we fight back against the forces of hate and extremism.

Project 2025: A Clear and Present Danger to Democracy

Click here for CGE’s fact sheet on the dangers Project 2025 poses to LGBTQI+ people.

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

Have you heard yet about Project 2025? Developed by the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with more than 100 partners, Project 2025 is innocuously pitched as “the plan for the next conservative President” of the United States.

But the 950+ pages of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” including the anti-LGBTQI+ quote above, represent something far more dangerous and far more comprehensive than a list of policy proposals. As our colleagues at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism explain, “Project 2025 is an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”

This is not hyperbole. This is, as Carlos Lozada noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, a plan for “capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.”

The mainstream media has been slow to pick up on the direct threat Project 2025 poses to American democracy and the rule of law, and especially to LGBTQI+ people, to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and to other marginalized communities. But Lozada’s op-ed and other recent pieces suggests that major outlets are beginning to recognize the existential danger to democracy at hand. Moreover, if recent reports prove accurate, President Biden is preparing to put Project 2025 at the heart of his argument for why Donald Trump cannot be allowed to return to the White House.

Explicitly grounded in far-right Christian nationalism, Project 2025 is a vision for the future of the United States that is profoundly undemocratic. The plan’s authors seek to eviscerate the professional, apolitical civil service, staffing all federal agencies instead with ideological appointees chosen for their loyalty to the President.

Project Democracy outlines seven fundamental tactics used by aspiring authoritarians:

Attempting to politicize independent institutions; Spreading disinformation; Aggrandizing executive power at the expense of checks and balances; Quashing criticism and dissent; Specifically targeting vulnerable or marginalized communities; Working to corrupt elections; and Stoking violence.

All seven tactics appear all throughout 950+ hate-filled pages of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership.

The Heritage Foundation and its partners vow to end racial equity efforts and climate change initiatives, implement “Fortress America” hardline immigration laws, and repeal so-called “woke” military policies. They would restrict human rights broadly and pull the United States out of international bodies such as the United Nations.

The Mandate for Leadership’s 950+ pages drip with unrelenting hate and contempt for LGBTQI+ people. Transgender people face particular vitriol from these extremists; this, unfortunately, is no surprise, with Project 2025’s leaders being intimately connected to those state legislators who have introduced more than 400 bills targeting transgender Americans in the first six weeks of 2024 alone.

From the very first page, the Mandate for Leadership equates so-called “transgenderism” with pornography, and all through the document, LGBTQI+ people are treated as deviants, not as Americans, not as stakeholders in their own government. The Project seeks, in its anti-LGBTQI+ and its restrictions on sexual and reproductive autonomy to demonize and penalize all non-traditional families, relying on junk science to back up its absurd claims that the Biden Administration is penalizing heterosexual marriage in favor of LGBTQI+ equity and single motherhood.

Globally, Project 2025 describes USAID’s LGBTQI+-inclusive programs as “bullying,” promises to end the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program that provides life-saving assistance to LGBTQI+ refugees and other refugees from vulnerable populations, and expands anti-LGBTQI+ and anti-reproductive health regulations to global health programs.

It vows to recommit the United States to the anti-abortion Geneva Consensus and the Commission on Unalienable Human Rights, which proposes a hierarchy of human rights elevating religious liberty and the right to private property while excluding LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive rights altogether.

The Council for Global Equality has published a fact sheet outlining the specific threats to LGBTQI+ human rights promised by Project 2025. Let’s be absolutely clear here: Project 2025’s targeting of LGBTQI+ people and of sexual and reproductive health and rights is inseparable from its overarching goal of dismantling democracy and capturing the U.S. federal government. It is no exaggeration to describe Project 2025’s Mandate as eliminationist, as it seeks to erase LGBTQI+ people from public life, from social protections, and from democratic citizenship altogether.

Last year, the Williams Institute published its report demonstrating a strong correlation between democratic backsliding and attacking LGBTQI+ rights, noting that “anti-LGBTI stigma and policies may contribute to the weakening of democratic norms and institutions [and that] increased persecution of minority groups, including LGBTI people, is itself evidence of democratic backsliding by indicating the erosion of liberal democratic norms of protecting minority rights.”

Project 2025’s dehumanization and exclusion of LGBTQI+ people is not an accident. This is an intentional strategy that aspiring authoritarians make, demonizing vulnerable minority communities as part of seizing political power — and BIPOC and immigrant LGBTQI+ people face even more demonization from the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators.

Let’s also clear that Project 2025 is not a vague wish list for the anti-democratic far right, nor is it intended to be a project that can be reversed by the next election. The assault on LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights are the entry points to the permanent capture of the federal government.

This is a very specific, detailed action plan for next year, a map to a journey that’s well underway now. Indeed, Project 2025 is already happening.  It’s happening in Argentina, where the new far-right President, Javier Milei, eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity immediately after taking office in December. It’s happening in Hungary, where President Viktor Orbán’s successful campaign to strip rights from LGBTQI+ people, women, and immigrants in service of building an “illiberal democracy” is the template for Project 2025. And it’s happening in U.S. states now, passing dozens upon dozens of anti-LGBTQI+ laws — some of which, such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, directly import Orbánism to the United States.

The evidence is piling up — in the House of Representatives, in state legislatures, and at local school boards, as well as around the world—that we must take the anti-rights movement broadly and Project 2025’s backers specifically at their word. They are telling us what they think of us and what they think of pluralistic, representative democracy.

We need to believe them — and at the same time, we must not lose hope. As Beirne Roose-Snyder, CGE’s own Senior Policy Fellow, recently told the rePROs Fight Back podcast, “hopelessness is a tool of oppression,” and the authors of Project 2025 need people to be “tired, hopeless, and passive, to see this as inevitable.”

It is not inevitable. But stopping the far right requires dragging their plans out into the light of day. It requires naming their plans, discussing it with our families, at work, in our faith communities, and beyond. It requires organizing – around national and state elections, to be sure, but also around local school board and judicial races and around protecting the integrity of elections themselves.

It requires coalition work — with voting rights advocates; with media workers and defenders of the free press; with sexual and reproductive health and rights activists; with racial justice, immigrant justice, disability justice, and climate justice organizers; with youth and with the labor movement; and with progressive faith communities.

There is much more to do and much more we could say. We’ll certainly be writing — and doing — plenty more about the clear and present danger that Project 2025, the Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation and their partners, and the larger anti-rights movement pose to inclusive, representative democracy. For the moment, please share the word, share our fact sheet, and let’s get to work.

World Refugee Day: Hope Away From Home

Refugees and immigrants looking for a new life. Column of migrants near the state borders. Fence and barbed wire. Surveillance, supervised. Abandon their lands for a better future. 3d render. Silhouette

Today, June 20, marks World Refugee Day when we celebrate the resilience and courage of those people forced to flee their home due to persecution, conflict, climate change, and other catastrophic crises.

While both the U.S. and global mechanisms of refuge, migration, and asylum are badly broken for all in flight, LGBTQI+ refugees escaping homophobia and transphobia along with these other threats face especially grave dangers — not only in their home countries but from some transit countries, from fellow refugees, and from international refugee systems often unable and sometimes unwilling to address the particular risks facing LGBTQI+ refugees.

Globally, there are more than 108 million forcibly displaced persons, according to the UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency. That’s up more than 250% in the last ten years. Put another way, if all those refugees made up a single country, that country would rank 13^th in population in the world, coming in just after Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines.

We don’t have reliable figures for how many LGBTQI+ refugees there are, as U.S. and international refugee agencies do not have systems in place to consistently track this data. In some cases, that speaks to officials not taking seriously the specific dangers facing LGBTQI+ refugees; in other cases, well-intentioned, legitimate concerns about the safety facing LGBTQI+ refugees become the grounds for not taking any action at all.

But we do know, for example, that one organization alone, Rainbow Railroad, received nearly 10,000 inquiries in 2022 regarding possible emergency resettlement and related services for LGBTQI+ refugees. Since the beginning of 2023, Rainbow Railroad has received yet another 4100+ such inquiries.

We know that hundreds of LGBTQI+ individuals in the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya live in fear of being attacked or even killed, with many of them having survived physical and sexual violence, according to a report last month from Amnesty International and the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC) of Kenya.

As Irungu Houghton, Amnesty International Kenya’s Executive Director, explained, “Despite a constitution that protects life and dignity for all, LGBTI asylum seekers suffer discrimination as well as homophobic and transphobic attitudes from government officials, the police and other service providers. This is often reflected in delays to the processing of their asylum claims, harassment, violent homophobic attacks, threats, and intimidation, and extremely limited opportunities for local integration or third-country resettlement.”

Speaking to the Washington Blade last week, Kieynan Gant described how “We are often forced to hide our true selves and live in isolation, unable to express ourselves or form meaningful relationships. Some have even been forced into marriages with people of the opposite sex against their will. … Our efforts [to raise awareness of these issues and demand better treatment for LGBTQI+ refugees] have been met with resistance and hostility from some of the other refugees in the camp who view our sexuality as a threat to their cultural and religious values.”

In recent years, some of the LGBTQI+ refugees in Kenya originally fled from Uganda. The recent passage of Uganda’s horrific Anti-Homosexuality Act has generated a sharp surge in LGBTQI+ refugees fleeing their country, with Rainbow Railroad receiving nearly 500 requests for help from Ugandans even before President Museveni signed the bill into law late last month.

The queer refugee crisis is hardly limited to East Africa. We continue to see a steady stream of LGBTQI+ people fleeing Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, the Caribbean, and other regions torn by war, extremist regimes, and pervasive homophobia and transphobia. LGBTQI+ Ukrainians fleeing the Russian war have encountered discrimination and harassment upon arriving in Poland and other neighboring countries, with same-sex couples and transgender refugees facing especially heightened risk for hostile treatment.

Likewise, Rainbow Railroad, Amnesty International, and other CGE members receive regular requests for emergency resettlement from LGBTQI+ Afghans sheltering in Pakistan, where their experiences illustrate the homophobia and transphobia that so many queer refugees face in transit countries.

In today’s World Refugee Day statement from the White House, President Biden reiterated his Administration’s promise to rebuild the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and to welcome 125,000 refugees next year. So far, however, the United States has only admitted just under 32,000 refugees this year, a pace well under the White House’s ambitious goals.

We call on Washington to follow in Ottawa’s lead and establish a direct referral program comparable to the landmark partnership just announced between Rainbow Railroad and the Canadian government. The United States needs to enable organizations like Rainbow Railroad that have full competency in LGBTQI+ refugee issues to refer such at-risk individuals for resettlement here.

We further applaud the U.S. government’s rollout of the Welcome Corps private sponsorship program, and we strongly encourage the various government agencies involved in resettlement work to ensure that at-risk LGBTQI+ refugees are indeed referred to approved private sponsorship organizations such as Rainbow Railroad.

This year’s theme for World Refugee Day is “Hope Away From Home: A World Where Refugees Are Always Included.” This must, of course, include all refugees, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. And we do see hope amidst this challenging work, as in the story of Ahmed, a bisexual refugee in Kenya. Ahmed, a bisexual refugee, has been working with ORAM — like Rainbow Railroad and Amnesty International, ORAM is a CGE member organization working to support LGBTQI+ refugees. After fleeing death threats in his native country and then experiencing discrimination in Jordan, his first transit country, Ahmed is now taking part in ORAM’s economic empowerment program in Kenya. With seed funding from ORAM, Ahmed launched a small business charging mobile devices, allowing him to get back on his feet and to support other LGBTQI+ refugees.

While U.S. and international refugee systems need comprehensive, LGBTQI+-inclusive reforms and funding, we do want to take a moment to celebrate Ahmed’s resilience and that of all queer refugees who have found safety and security, even as we work together to make sure that hope away from home is a reality, not just a dream, for so many more.

State Department Retains LGBTI Special Envoy: What Does It Mean? Will it Respond to Global Call from LGBT Advocates?

Last week’s Congressional notification that the Trump Administration has decided not to abolish the LGBTI human rights Special Envoy position was an unexpected surprise.

We know there are many dedicated State Department officials who believe passionately that the United States must stand for human rights, including equality and dignity for LGBT individuals everywhere, as a cornerstone of our foreign policy. And recent reports suggest Secretary Tillerson may have raised well-documented cases of LGBT persecution in Chechnya with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in a letter this summer. Yet, we’ve seen very little indication that Administration leaders care about a comprehensive human rights policy, or LGBT rights, after all:

• A number of concrete actions – the ban on trans military service, opposition to federal employment protections, and the decision to rescind Obama-era guidance on protections for transgender students in public schools – have been injurious to LGBT citizens at home.
• “America First” policies have slammed the door on refugees and immigrants, more than 75,000 LGBT DREAMers included – and on the international cooperation needed to stand for fairness and equality abroad.
• Secretary Tillerson astoundingly has sought to separate democratic “values” from the pursuit of narrower, arguably raw, national “interests” (see his speech here) – turning his back on U.S. diplomatic priorities pursued across the postwar years.
• President Trump’s expansion of the “Global Gag Rule” to all U.S. global health funding, including global AIDS funding through PEPFAR, undermines our investments in sexual and reproductive health and rights, with equally devastating impact for LGBT individuals who may now be forced to depend on faith-based implementers that are unlikely to be as welcoming or effective in supporting the health and rights of LGBT communities.
• And the impact of these policy shifts is becoming clear: only last week, the Washington Post traced a sharp uptick in human rights abuses in Egypt to messages that President Trump conveyed in his May meeting with that country’s president.

In this light, how are we to understand retention of the Special Envoy position? Is it mere window dressing? Or will the Administration use the position vigorously to tackle a global crisis in hate crimes, abuse, and legal discrimination against LGBT people?

We are concerned that, in the first seven months of this Administration, the Department’s Special Envoy hasn’t been directed to make a single overseas trip to engage foreign governments on any of the LGBT-related human rights violations so carefully documented in the Department’s annual human rights reports. That concern is only amplified by Secretary Tillerson’s decision (as reflected in the Congressional notification) to co-hat the Special Envoy’s targeted responsibilities with the much larger duties of a Deputy Assistant Secretary (DAS) – a situation that exists now, but that was intended to be temporary, given personnel shifts and shortfalls. That co-hatting may well bury the Special Envoy’s substantive responsibilities under heavy managerial and substantive duties of the kind that any DAS carries.

But a broader question is whether the Administration can carry genuine moral authority to engage, even modestly, on LGBT human rights while its policies at home, and its lack of engagement on human rights abroad, have been so troubling.

The global credibility of the Special Envoy position, then, is directly proportional to the Administration’s record on Constitutional protections at home. It requires the thoughtful and deliberate inclusion of LGBT populations in appropriate bilateral economic, development, and health programs. It too requires regular engagement with other countries on problems impacting LGBT populations, all the while acknowledging that our country’s record in this sphere remains troubled. And it requires swift condemnation of hate crimes and hate groups – not the “blame on both sides” cop-out the President used in his troubling response to far-right violence in Charlottesville this summer.

LGBT advocates from around the world have urged President Trump to honor our country’s commitment to human rights. See their video here. Eight months later, we reiterate their call. Keeping the Special Envoy may be a start – but only if the Administration honors our country’s call to equality with humility, funding, and concrete action.

What to Expect From Romney

The Council for Global Equality has urged elected representatives and their staff from both major political parties to stand against LGBT human rights abuse and support LGBT-fair policies around the world.  With the Republican Party now poised to nominate its presidential candidate, we address that appeal to Governor Romney.

Over the past four years, President Obama and his Administration have offered unprecedented support for LGBT human rights abroad:

• The President has spoken out forcefully against anti-gay legislation pending in Uganda; his Administration has registered U.S. concerns about anti-LGBT discrimination and actions in countries ranging from Senegal, Cameroon, and Malawi to Lithuania, Honduras and Iraq.
• The State Department’s annual human rights reports now give equal attention to the difficulties faced by LGBT people in every corner of the world.
• New funding streams have been opened to support LGBT civil society organizations in troubled areas of the world.
• The plight of LGBT refugees is being addressed.
• Transgender Americans now can amend passport gender markers with greater dignity, while passport and birth report forms to be filed by gay and lesbian parents have been made more inclusive.
• Secretary Clinton has spoken directly before an important human rights body about the need for the international community to address the issue of LGBT fairness more squarely.
• And President Obama has directed all foreign affairs agencies to ensure that LGBT populations are integrated, where appropriate, into our foreign assistance programs and policies.

Through these actions, the Obama Administration has reaffirmed that no minority, in any country, is immune from international standards of human rights protections, and that America will stand for fairness for all people, including LGBT populations, as part of its foreign policy.  In doing so, it has drawn from America’s principles of equality, fairness, and justice – principles that are part of our national conscience and discourse.

We’ve heard little from Governor Romney about human rights – or, indeed, about how he would approach the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people within his prospective human rights policy.  We hope he will speak to these issues in the remaining course of his campaign, and that he will show leadership in ensuring that defending LGBT human and civil rights is a point of national unity, not one of political division.

Protection Concerns and Vulnerabilities for LGBT Iraqis

Blog Posting Written by: Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, July 2012

In March of 2012, U.S. and international media outlets reported a renewed wave of violence against LGBT individuals inside Iraq. Since that time, the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) has conducted nearly 50 interviews (and counting) with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Iraqis who fear persecution and/or face serious protection concerns inside Iraq because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. About 45 interviewees identify as gay males and two are transgender persons, assigned female but identifying as male.

The Current Situation on the Ground for Gay Iraqi Men:

Protection concerns and vulnerabilities vary within the gay Iraqi community depending on whether the man is able to, or chooses to, hide any outward manifestation of his sexual orientation. Those that suppress any outward manifestation of their sexuality do not face immediate physical danger. Most are able to maintain jobs and leave their homes without facing serious protection concerns, but cite the psychological aspects of hiding a huge part of their identity as unbearable, and suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts. Additionally, all fear being “outed” and discovered by their families who may become suspicious of their sexual orientation because the men have never been married, or have been married but are now divorced.

Those whose sexual orientation is either known to their families or the general public face severe outward, physical harm, in addition to severe psychological trauma. A small number of the men interviewed were put under house arrest by family members after their sexual identity became known. This often includes severe beatings and intense pressure to marry in order to cover up any scandal. Other men were beaten by family members, mostly fathers and brothers, but then immediately kicked out of their homes with nowhere to go. This forced them to live house-to-house, depending on sympathetic family members or friends. Even those with relatively safe housing do not leave their homes, unless it is absolutely necessary, out of fear of being harassed, found by family members wanting to harm them or picked up by police or security forces. A large number of men have been subjected to severe sexual violence, including rape, from family members, police, security forces, and members of the larger community. Many also reported physical violence at the hands of these perpetrators, and, to a lesser extent, militant groups like Jeash Al-Mahdi or Al-Haqq. Like those who have not been “outed,” a disturbing number of gay men, with whom IRAP spoke, wished they were dead, could change their sexual orientation or be “normal.”

Strengthening Protection for LGBT Refugees

Anne Richard, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration addresses crowd at event marking IDAHO.

Council Chair Mark Bromley moderated a panel at an event hosted by The Council for Global Equality, The Human Rights Campaign, and Human Rights First marking International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO). The event also marked the release of The Road to Safety: Strengthening Protection of LGBTI Refugees in Uganda and Kenya by Human Rights First. Remarks were made by the Honorable Anne Richard, Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration; as well as Eleanor Acer, Director of the Refugee Protection Program at Human Rights First. HRC Legislative Director, Allison Herwitt opened the event. There was also an interactive panel discussion with Duncan Breen – Senior Associate for HRF’s Refugee Protection Program – and Larry Yungk – Senior Resettlement Officer of the UN Refugee Agency.

Click here to watch the full event.

Read Secretary Anne Richards remarks here.