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Controversial Sexual “Rights” Being Pushed at UN Human Rights Council

By Samantha Singson

NEW YORK, October 6, 2006 ( C-FAM.org ) - Away from the media scrutiny surrounding the opening of the General Assembly in New York, the new UN Human Rights Council (HRC) is wrapping up its second session in Geneva today after three weeks of deliberation. Established earlier this year as part of a UN reform process aimed at increasing UN transparency and legitimacy, the HRC is facing many of the same problems that plagued its discredited predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights (CHR).

This week a coalition of NGOs presented a report entitled, “Building the UN Human Rights Council and its Special Procedures: Notes for Sexual Rights and Reproductive Rights Advocates.” The report, funded by the Ford Foundation, laid out a strategy to “work together to develop a more balanced analysis of sexuality and sexual rights that will include but also move beyond issues of identity, violence and discrimination to allow for the consideration of positive claims such as the right to broader sexual freedom and a right to sexual expression and pleasure.”

The publication also commended CHR and HRC in “calling for the decriminalization of abortion, thus setting the stage for arguments that a right to abortion exists in international law.”

Also on the docket in Geneva was a report on the controversial “right to health” by UN Special Rapporteur, Paul Hunt. Conservative UN experts are concerned that while the General Assembly (GA) recognizes a right to the highest attainable standard of health, the term “right to health,” which the Hunt report also uses, has never been accepted in a binding UN document and runs the risk of being misinterpreted. The experts also point out that while the GA accepts that the term “sexual and reproductive health” excludes abortion and other new rights, UN officials like Hunt and treaty compliance committees continue to misinterpret the term.

Since the beginning of his mandate in 2003, Hunt has repeatedly called for the recognition of sexual rights. In a 2004 interview published by the Essex Human Rights Review, Hunt wrote, “I have no doubt that within the right to health there is a sub-set of sexual and reproductive health rights…It is misguided to think of reproductive health as the overarching issue. Obviously, it is not! The overarching issue is sexual health.” 

Creating controversy in a 2004 report to the CHR, Hunt said he had, “no doubt that the correct understanding of fundamental human rights principles, as well as existing human rights norms, leads ineluctably to the recognition of sexual rights as human rights. Sexual rights include the right of all persons to express their sexual orientation. …Since many expressions of sexuality are non-reproductive, it is misguided to subsume sexual rights, including the right to sexual health, under reproductive rights and reproductive health.”

As well as serving as a UN Special Rapporteur, Hunt is a member of the Center for Reproductive Rights’ (CRR) Expert Litigation Committee. The CRR was founded in 1992 with the aim of making abortion legal and accessible worldwide. Hunt’s UN mandate has been extended until next year.

After considering reports from the Special Rapporteurs this week, the HRC is scheduled to conclude today and reconvene at the end of November.

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