Going Global: An International Human Rights Approach to Russian LGBTQ+ Law and Practices

Abstract

The current treatment of LGBTQ+ people in Russia is characterized by a discriminatory withholding of rights and political and societal isolation and endangerment. While this situation is well-documented, the legal analyses of it have been more limited. Those that have been undertaken in the past decade have focused almost exclusively on the regional European Court of Human Rights as the vehicle to address Russian discrimination against its sexual and gender minorities. The scholarship has long ignored an international human rights approach, however, which, through the treaty bodies of the nine core international human rights treaties, has developed a robust set of recommendations on Russia’s treatment of its LGBTQ+ population that condemns anti-LGBTQ+ Russian laws and practices. While this article focuses on international human rights law in relation to Russia as an informative case study, it hopes to open new terrain on understanding and addressing the mistreatment of LGBTQ+ persons at the domestic level in other countries too through analyzing international human rights law, an approach that has long been ignored in advancing LGBTQ+ rights.