South Africa and Sexual Orientation Rights at the United Nations: Batting for Both Sides

ABSTRACT

In 2011 South Africa led the UN Human Rights Council to adopt the first-ever UN resolution on sexual orientation. In 2014, South Africa was the only African state to support the follow-up to the 2011 resolution. These actions create the impression that South Africa is strongly committed to the international advancement of sexual orientation rights. However, this article scrutinises South Africa’s actions on sexual orientation rights at the UN for the period 1995–2015 and will demonstrate South Africa’s inconsistency, its frequent failures to support sexual orientation rights internationally, and its various actions against the advancement of these rights. The article sets South Africa’s behaviour on sexual orientation rights against broader questions of the place of human rights in South African foreign policy and South Africa’s international leadership.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 South Africa could not vote because it was not a member of the HRC at the time.

2 Interviews took place between February and May 2014 and in May 2015.

3 Brief mentions of sexual orientation and human rights in discussions of South African foreign policy can be found in (2013); Jordaan (2014a, 116–117) and Jordaan (2015, 476–477). For overviews of human rights in South African foreign policy, see Barber (2004), Brysk (2009), Graham (2013), Smith (2015, 2016).

4 The HRC replaced the CHR in 2006.

5 The CHR had 53 members, 15 from the African Group.

6 No African countries opposed the amendment, while only 2 abstained. The overall vote on the amendment was 79–70 (17 abstentions).

7 The vote on the amendment was 93–53 (27 abstentions).

8 HRC Extranet, OHCHR. A password is needed, available at http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/HRCRegistration.aspx.

Additional information

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge that this study was funded by Singapore Management University through a research grant [C242/MSS13S005] from the Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 1 Academic Research Fund.