By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
LIMA, December 3, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) -The Peruvian national Congress, in full session, refused to ratify the pro-homosexual “Ibero-American Convention on the Rights of Young People,” on Thursday of last week, citing concerns that it would legalize “homosexual marriage” in the country.
The convention’s text, which was formulated under the auspices of the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund (UNFP) and signed in 2005 by representatives of numerous Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, contains vague language on the right of 15-24 year-olds to determine their own “identity” and “image” as well as the right to create a family.
“This convention establishes the liberty of sexual choice for creating families, while our constitution protects marriage between a man and a woman and not between people of the same sex,” said the president of Peru’s Justice Commission, an organ of the national Congress, after the vote.
The offending portion of the treaty is Article 5, which outlines the “principle of non-discrimination” and states that “the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms recognized for young people in the present Convention does not admit any discrimination founded on…sexual orientation…or any other personal condition or circumstance experienced by young people that could be invoked to establish discrimination that affects the equality of rights and opportunities they enjoy.”
However, the convention also contains numerous other provisions objectionable to defenders of human life and family.
Article 23 asserts that youth have the “right to a sexual education”, and states that “sex education will be given at all educational levels and will promote responsible conduct in the exercise of sexuality, oriented to total acceptance and identity as well as the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV (AIDS), undesired pregnancies, and sexual abuse or violence.”
Article 25 declares that young people have the “right to health,” which includes “the right to privacy and with respect to health services personnel in particular, in that which relates to sexual and reproductive health”. The term “sexual and reproductive health” is commonly understood by international agencies to refer to abortion.
So far, the treaty has been ratified by the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Spain. Ten others are moving towards ratification, including Bolivia, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Portugal, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Alonoso Igna, the head of “Human Rights” at the Homosexual Movement of Lima, acknowledged that the treaty’s defeat in Peru was a setback for his organization’s cause, complaining that “there exists a somewhat retrograde thinking about what constitute rights. It’s another snub, and another sign of the discrimination that we suffer. Peru has signed on to so many international human rights treaties, but in this type of case it doesn’t comply.”