Abstract
AbstractThe business and human rights field and the international LGBTI human rights agenda have evolved almost entirely separately. The United Nations ‘Standards of Conduct for Business on Tackling Discrimination against LGBTI People’ (2017) is the primary effort to bridge this gap. Although drafted in a way that strongly aligns with the second pillar of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights on corporate responsibility, the dissemination of the Standards has mainly been untethered from the human rights framework and system. This article identifies the need to reassert the human rights foundations of the Standards and leverage their existing momentum to set out a more robust research and policy agenda for meaningfully accounting for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics in business and human rights frameworks. To that end, the article sets out priority areas for greater attention from researchers, decision-makers and advocates.
Highlights
On 17 June 2011, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council broke ground on a new agenda in the international human rights system – human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).[1]
Not everyone discriminated against on the basis of SOGIESC self-identifies under the LGBTI umbrella, and ‘local identity labels may be imbued with cultural significance that is lost when replaced by the LGBT acronym.’[12]. Notably, SOGIESC is the preferred term used in the international human rights framework;[13] this framing better supports an interrogation of how patriarchal norms and constructed genders punish social and sexual non-conformity through violence and discrimination, as well as how this discrimination intersects with other forms of oppression and exclusion
While the LGBTI international human rights agenda and UNGPs have evolved in parallel and overlapped in time by coincidence at several key points, these two critical agendas have seen little to no substantive convergence
Summary
On 17 June 2011, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council broke ground on a new agenda in the international human rights system – human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).[1]. Not everyone discriminated against on the basis of SOGIESC self-identifies under the LGBTI umbrella, and ‘local identity labels may be imbued with cultural significance that is lost when replaced by the LGBT acronym.’[12] Notably, SOGIESC is the preferred term used in the international human rights framework;[13] this framing better supports an interrogation of how patriarchal norms and constructed genders punish social and sexual non-conformity through violence and discrimination, as well as how this discrimination intersects with other forms of oppression and exclusion. The diversity of lived experiences within global LGBTI communities results in biases and dramatic inequalities in terms of which people and which priorities are captured under the most visible LGBTI human rights and equality banners.[14]
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