There Are Always Allies

Boris Dittrich is the Advocacy Director for the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. Dittrich helped launch the Yogyakarta Principles, a set of doctrines on the application of human rights law to homosexuality and gender identity. He also helped organize two events at the United Nations which resulted in a joint statement of 66 countries condemning discrimination due to sexual orientation or gender identity. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 2007, Dittrich served as a member of the Dutch National Parliament for over 12 years. As an MP, Dittrich introduced legislation to legalize same-sex marriage in the Netherlands. The bill was passed in 2001, making the Netherlands the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.

There is often a difference between a country signing a resolution and actually making internal reforms. Do you believe that international human rights resolutions are important because they directly influence governments, or are they more effective as advocacy tools for NGOs?

Actually, resolutions can be useful in both ways.

LGBT groups in a specific country can use international resolutions to hold their governments accountable. After a resolution has been passed, it becomes a wonderful advocacy tool if a government does not live up to its promises. An advocacy group can go to the government and remind them of what they promised and demand that they change their laws or policies to live up to their promises. So it’s a wonderful way of sandwiching a government, putting pressure on them both from international structures, and from the bottom up through the local community.

Of course, this requires that the local community knows what’s going on at the U.N. or at the Organization of American States or the African Union, so a lot of information sharing is necessary. That is the role that Human Rights Watch plays, sharing information and bringing stakeholders together.

The Netherlands is a comparatively secular country; how have you adapted your advocacy work to reach religious audiences now that you advocate for LGBT rights around the world?

What I see in other parts of the world is that homophobia is driven by religion, by many different kinds of religion. That is why it is important that we analyze the sentiments within specific religious communities.

That was not an issue in the Netherlands when I proposed same sex marriage, because it is indeed a relatively secular society, but in large parts of the world you need to have feet on the ground within a religious community. There are always allies, liberal thinkers within religious groups, and we always try to work with them.

One example comes from when we were advocating for a Joint Statement of 66 countries in the U.N. calling for an end to discrimination and violence against LGBT people. The Vatican was against the resolution and was trying to influence countries not to sign the statement. To make a long story short, I reached out to the Vatican, they came over to New York and we talked, and in 2009 the Holy See gave a statement condemning violence and what they called “unjust” discrimination against homosexuals.

This is an example of how reaching out to a religion can benefit the LGBT global movement; we can use the Vatican’s statement at the U.N. in countries in Africa or the Caribbean where some priests advocate turning homosexuals in to the police to be punished. We can show them the statement from the Vatican that says what they are doing is wrong. That helps to put pressure on local religious community leaders that are sometimes inciting hatred.

Many countries, including the United States and the Netherlands, have generally become more tolerant of LGBT citizens in recent decades. However, at the same time, in other countries anti-LGBT sentiment seems to have gotten stronger. Do you see the actions of countries like Ukraine as inevitable backlash of liberalization or as emblematic of a global trend?

There are several intersecting global trends; there is positive development in countries that introduce same sex marriage and do away with LGBT prejudices. But at the same time there is negative development in several Eastern European countries, like Russia, Lithuania, Moldova, and most recently Ukraine, where Parliament has voted in favor of the law banning public discussion of homosexuality.

It would be impossible to have this interview on television in Kiev, because it is what they call propaganda of homosexuality. And other countries in Eastern Europe and Africa are copying these anti-propaganda laws. So there are conflicting trends, and our role is to encourage one trend while stopping another.

Coming from a functioning parliamentary democracy, what methods do you now employ at Human Rights Watch to advance LGBT rights in places like Uganda where there is rampant governmental corruption and violent anti-homosexual attitudes?

I’ll use the example of Uganda, where a proposal, called the anti-homosexuality bill, has been introduced which includes the death penalty. There has been a clampdown by the government against civil LGBT groups trying to organize against the bill.  A few months ago, activists were meeting in a hotel when the Minister of the Interior and the police barged in and confiscated all the documents and material and arrested the leader. But that also happened to other human rights and environmental groups working on completely different issues.

What we did at Human Rights Watch was publish a report about the clampdown by government on civil society, which included LGBT groups but not only LGBT groups. In our report we emphasized the fact that restriction of the freedom of expression harms everyone in a society. One consequence of the report was to make the various groups feel that they are all in the same boat, and that they should support each other against the government.

Feature Photo: cc/thisisbossi