This session was notable as the session where the UN’s second resolution on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights was passed.
ILGA was involved in helping coordinate and lead concerted lobbying in the weeks before the HRC, working in coalition with others to encourage leadership amongst governments to bring the resolution. The resolution was eventually brought by Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay.
ILGA was also involved during the HRC to encourage governments to vote in favour of the resolution or, if that was not possible, to abstain. To do all this, ILGA worked with other organizations having funding to bring an agreed, diverse, strategic and informed group of human rights defenders to Geneva, pooling resources. Human rights defenders were in Geneva in four staggered tranches: a week before the council started, and then during each of the three weeks of the HRC itself.
The primary activities during this period were meeting the lead sponsors of the resolution, meeting “swing” countries to persuade them to vote in favour, attending and contributing resolution negotiations, meeting with civil society present in Geneva to share strategies and information, preparing information and briefing notes for delegations, liaising with defenders in-country to ensure that messages were transmitted to their capitals to vote in favour (or abstain) and communicating to the various list serves important developments.
Strategies were made particularly complicated by the bringing of 7 hostile amendments to the resolution, each of which was eventually defeated. The final vote was a significant improvement on the previous vote: 25 in favour (23 in 2011), 14 against (18 in 2011) and the remainder abstentions or absent from the room.