Affirming Human Rights

In far too many countries, laws still criminalize LGBTQI+ relationships and expression and deny freedoms of association, speech, and expression to LGBTQI+ persons and organizations. Bias-motivated crimes are committed with impunity against LGBTQI+ populations in every region, with transgender individuals particularly targeted. Discriminatory public policies in many countries make access by LGBTQI+ individuals to life-saving HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment difficult, and often make it impossible for the LGBTQI+ community to seek health services. LGBTQI+ individuals and organizations  regularly are denied access to economic and educational opportunities, marginalized within civil society, and specifically excluded from opportunities for civic and democratic participation. These abuses are most often met with impunity, as police, courts, and community institutions are often eager to ignore or even sanction the abuses, while politicians and government officials scapegoat the community to advance their own political ends. 

The Council seeks rapid, consistent, and principled responses from U.S. policymakers and like-minded governments  to these human rights abuses. As a coalition, we assert that a values-based, human-rights forward approach to U.S. foreign policy and LGBTQI+ equality is morally responsible, economically beneficial, and in the long-term national security interests of the United States. We also insist that the rights of transgender people alongside those  of gender nonconforming and intersex persons, which have come under intense and vitriolic attack around the world, must be affirmed as fundamental human rights that are founded on well-established rights to autonomy, privacy, nondiscrimination, and free expression.

When urgent situations targeting LGBTQI+ persons or organizations  arise, the Council engages U.S. and foreign diplomats and senior policy makers across a range of foreign policy institutions and on Capitol Hill. We urge parallel policy advocacy at the United Nations and in other multilateral fora in response to abuse. We also educate our membership to ensure an integrated response across our member groups to build durable diplomatic and development responses.