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Asserting
Our Humanity: The Yogyakarta Principles as a Local and
Global Instrument for Sexual Minorities
Ryan
Richard Thoreson
Department
of Social Anthropology
Oxford
University
(Reino
Unido)
In Human Rights and Gender
Violence, legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry argues
that the effective implementation of human rights requires
a balance between “a transnational community that
envisions a unified modernity and national and local
actors for whom particular histories and contexts are
important.” If laws are only instituted locally without
attention to the global arena, activists will miss
valuable opportunities to share best practices, build a
consensus, and forge normative values worldwide. If laws
are handed down from transnational elites without regard
to local actors, those laws will fail resonate with those
people and are thus likely to be ignored. By insisting
that the global must take the local into account – and
vice versa – Merry has identified some of the key
shortcomings of countless efforts to combat gender
violence over the years. Like gender and family
hierarchies, sexual orientation and gender identity are
deeply bound to cultural understandings; unlike gender
violence, they have yet to be definitively addressed and
protected by major international bodies. In recognition of
this omission, a group of experts wrote and released the
Yogyakarta Principles of 2007, launched as “a set of
principles on the application of international human
rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender
identity.” The Principles were celebrated as a crucial
tool, but without official sponsorship from sovereign
states or a multilateral organization, they were
effectively non-binding and did not technically affect the
legal status of sexual minorities. In light of the
technical limitations of the Principles, what strategic
value might this type of non-binding declaration have for
local and global advocacy? By looking at homophobia and
human rights, existing protections for sexual minorities,
the potential benefits and pitfalls of a non-binding
declaration, I find that the Yogyakarta Principles are
likely to be a useful tool for rights defenders – first,
because they identify a human population that is routinely
denied basic human rights, and secondly, because they
persuasively situate the local struggles of that
population within binding global laws that governments
have already agreed to obey. The paper concludes with ways
that local, national, and international bodies can
incorporate the Yogyakarta Principles into policymaking
and ways that activists and advocacy groups can tactically
use the Principles to push for substantive changes. As
such, the paper invites discussion and deliberation from
conference delegates about transnational efforts to combat
homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in local and
regional contexts.
About Ryan Richard
Thoreson
Ryan Richard Thoreson is
currently reading for the MPhil in Social Anthropology as
a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. His work on
progressive social movements has appeared in the Advocate,
the Nation, and the American Prospect, and his analysis of
the gay and lesbian movement in South Africa is
forthcoming in the Journal of Southern African Studies.
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