Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointedly referenced a “disturbing trend of 2010 was the repression of vulnerable minorities, including racial and ethnic and religious minorities along with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people,” internationally, in announcing the 35th State Department Country Report on Human Rights Practices, released Friday afternoon in Washington, D.C.
Clinton reiterated her assertion, as well as the U.S. government’s position, that gay rights are human rights–and accentuated the U.S. government’s concerns about the threatened lives of LGBT people in Uganda by stating:
“And because I believe, and our government believes, that gay rights are human rights, we remain extremely concerned about state-sanctioned homophobia. In Uganda, for example, homosexuality remains illegal, and people are being harassed, discriminated against, threatened, and intimidated.”
This may be the first time a U.S. official has publicly uttered the words “state-sanctioned homophobia” in connection to a State Department human rights report. I am no longer surprised by anything Hillary Clinton says or does–she continues to break ground and set new milestones as America’s chief diplomat and advocate for human rights. Despite her formal diplomatic presentation, Clinton’s words today challenge autocratic regimes to do more to protect the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people around the world.
Certainly, hopefully, officials of the Uganda government are probably shocked by being named publicly as state sponsors of hatred toward gays by the U.S. Secretary of State for their unabashed efforts to aid, abet, and harm Ugandan LGBT citizens, which resulted in the murder of gay activist David Kato in January 2011.
Read:Â “Ugandan Kill The Gays Bill Returns With 2 Million Signature Petition“
Clinton’s words matter, especially in light of continuing efforts to bring Uganda’s “Kill The Gays” bill back before the parliament for a vote before recessing.
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The report also focuses on state-sponsored extrajudicial killings, torture, detention, and disappearance, along with government corruption.
Clinton, who is arguably the most visible and forceful leader in the Obama Administration on LGBT rights, ordered formal reporting on gay rights to be included in the annual human rights country reports when she became Secretary of State in January, 2009. The 2010 report reflects the first such report that includes a new emphasis on LGBT rights and a renewed emphasis on women’s rights in more than 190 of countries throughout the world.
The report was delayed by a few months due to the North Africa uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the current humanitarian intervention in Libya, forged by the UN Security Council Resolution 1973. It takes in account the fluid situation in North Africa and the Middle East and states that the outcome remains to be seen if human rights will be respected in those countries where revolutionary changes are currently underway.
The other two trends reported in the overview of the 2010 human rights report indicate that “more than 90 governments have sought to pass restrictive laws and regulations, hampering the ability of organizations to register, operate freely, or receive foreign funding,” and that, because of “the explosive growth in the use of the Internet, mobile phones and other connective technologies that allow instantaneous communications to billions of people across the globe,” a number of governments have resorted to Internet censorship and sought to block access to the Internet by human rights activists who work to overturn such harsh tactics.
The report also shows that more than 40 governments are now “using a combination of regulatory restrictions, technical controls on access to the Internet, and technologies designed to repress speech and infringe on the personal privacy of those who use these rapidly evolving technologies.”
Since the Iran “Green” uprising in June 2009, the State Department has continually sought to enable activists access to Facebook and Twitter, even when hostile governments strove to deny them access by turning off the Internet. Most recently activists used these social media platforms in Tunisia and Egypt to help organize, eventually overthrowing two dictators who had been in power for decades, all occuring since the beginning of 2011.
Read: “Wikileaks, Twitter, Cable News Fuel Tunisia Uprising Perfect Storm“
In another move toward transparency, today also marked the unveiling by Clinton of a new website– humanrights.gov— open to everyone, and empowers human rights defenders with access to information about human rights abuses in countries which deny such information to their own citizens. In a brief peruse of the site, I was quite impressed by the depth and breadth of information contained on it and its nuanced approach to organizing human rights abuses, such as using the term “human integrity,” to report a number of incidents and violation of LGBT persons.
This website marks the first time the Universal Bill of Human Rights is listed on a U.S. government website that also includes the status of all international human rights treaties. Appropriately, this website showcases a famous photo of Eleanor  Roosevelt, unveiling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted under her leadership and adopted by the UN as its base document in 1948, from which all human rights treaties emanate. This website marks a symmetrical moment–from Eleanor Roosevelt, a controversial First Lady of the United States in her day, who wrote the framework for all human rights documents as an outcome from one of the darkest periods in human history–to that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was also an equally controversial First Lady, and who has broken new ground by forcefully articulating the new human rights of the 21st century.
A more detailed regional and country report analyzing the human rights report’s contents on the status of global LGBT rights is forthcoming.
Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.
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