From Pariah to Priority gives a unique, insider perspective that explains the unexpected incorporation of LGBTI rights into the United States and Swedish foreign policies. From original data, case study analysis, and interviews with high-level officials within the State Department, Swedish Foreign Ministry and international institutions, former diplomat Elise Carlson Rainer provides insights from leaders responsible for shaping emerging global LGBTI policies. The research findings highlight the advocacy process of reforming US and Swedish foreign policy priorities to include LGBTI rights, shedding light on how normative values evolve in foreign affairs. The book examines Sweden as the first country to implement a feminist foreign policy and commence formal LGBTI diplomacy. Through this lens, Rainer contextualizes the diplomatic precedent of revamping foreign assistance to Uganda when lawmakers there proposed a death penalty law for homosexuality. Scrutinizing effective tactics for advocacy to influence foreign policy, From Pariah to Priority explores not only current debates in the area of gender and sexuality in foreign affairs, but also offers pragmatic policy recommendations for civil society organizations, foreign policy leaders, and human rights practitioners.

This three-volume set is a rich resource for readers in any discipline interested in understanding the global, regional, and domestic experiences of LGB people. This interdisciplinary set makes a vital contribution to understanding how LGB rights are progressing—and in some cases, regressing—around the globe. The three volumes look at the lived experiences of LGB people from varied perspectives and provide comprehensive coverage on a wide variety of topics ranging from LGB youth and LGB aging to the approaches to LGB people of different religions, including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Chapters focus on topics including the ongoing criminalization of same-sex sexual conduct and how international human rights law can be used to improve the lives of LGB people. Particular attention is paid to the rights of bisexuals, a group often ignored in works focusing on sexual orientation. Volume 1 focuses on history, politics, and culture relating to LGB people; Volume 2 focuses on the laws—domestic and international—governing LGB people; and Volume 3 provides snapshots of the current state of LGB experience in countries worldwide, presented by geographical region: Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region.

This book analyzes the role of strategic human rights litigation in the dissemination and migration of transnational constitutional norms and provides a detailed analysis of how transnational human rights advocates and their local partners have used international and foreign law to promote abolition of the death penalty and decriminalization of homosexuality. The “sharing” of human rights jurisprudence among judges across legal systems is currently spreading emerging norms among domestic courts and contributing to the evolution of international law. While prior studies have focused on international and foreign citations in judicial decisions, this global migration of constitutional norms is driven not by judges but by legal advocates themselves, who cite and apply international and foreign law in their pleadings in pursuit of a specific human rights agenda. Local and transnational legal advocates form partnerships and networks that transmit legal strategy and comparative doctrine, taking advantage of similarities in postcolonial legal and constitutional frameworks. Using examples such as the abolition of the death penalty and decriminalization of same-sex relations, this book traces the transnational networks of human rights lawyers and advocacy groups who engage in constitutional litigation before domestic and supranational tribunals in order to embed international human rights norms in local contexts. In turn, domestic human rights litigation influences the evolution of international law to reflect state practice in a mutually reinforcing process. Accordingly, international and foreign legal citations offer transnational human rights advocates powerful tools for legal reform.

The toolkit provides a framework for the delivery of training for government officials, frontline service providers and members of the general public within the Commonwealth. It provides the necessary information and tools to facilitate a training or sensitisation session on gender and sexual diversity, foundational human rights knowledge, as well as on the challenges faced by members of the local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex community. The toolkit addresses a range of different areas. Each section of the toolkit can be used as a stand-alone tool for sensitisation that may be utilised by the trainers trained under its framework. In this way, each section can be deployed strategically according to the needs identified within a given ministry, department or agency.

"Human rights in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity are at last reaching the heart of global debates. Yet 78 states worldwide continue to criminalise same-sex sexual behaviour, and due to the legal legacies of the British Empire, 42 of these - more than half - are in the Commonwealth of Nations. In recent years many states have seen the emergence of new sexual nationalisms, leading to increased enforcement of colonial sodomy laws against men, new criminalisations of sex between women and discrimination against transgender people. [This book] challenges these developments as the first book to focus on experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) and all non-heterosexual people in the Commonwealth. The volume offers the most internationally extensive analysis to date of the global struggle for decriminalisation of same-sex sexual behaviour and relationships."--Abstract, website.

The Queer/Sexual minority which interalia includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (hereinafter LGBT) people is not a new phenomenon in today’s scenario. LGBT share a particular experience of their own sexual desires, as potentially directed toward a person of the same gender. They have transformed these experiences, desires, and practices into a social identity, a sexual orientation, which serves as a marker of individual selves and of a group. This study shows that discrimination and abuse from homophobic/transphobic world in which there is full permission to treat LGBT with cruelty makes it difficult for them to maintain a strong sense of well-being and self-esteem. Study reveals that in India LGBT lives are more secretive as they are suppress to come out easily. This book based on study concludes with some strong and viable recommendations, which are requisite to ensure safe and proper place to LGBT people in society, inculcating humane approach into laws and the criminal justice system. Education and awareness programmes through various means and various places can bring positive changes. Note: T& F does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This report is a comprehensive look at the human rights work of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) around the world in 2010. It highlights the UK's human rights concerns in key countries and is a further concrete demonstration of the Foreign Secretary's commitment to strengthening the FCO's work on human rights at home and overseas. The report is more comprehensive than previous years, is being hosted online to make it much more accessible to the public and the website will include updates every three months to highlight key human rights events and actions that take place in each of the featured countries of concern. The update for the first three months of 2011 will be published online simultaneously. The present report covers topics such as: promoting British values; human rights in safeguarding Britain's national security; human rights in promoting Britain's prosperity; human rights for British Nationals overseas; working through a rules-based international system; promoting human rights in the overseas territories. It also gives details by country of those countries where human rights is of particular concern

This book contributes to current debates about “queer outsides” and “queer outsiders” that emerge from tensions in legal reforms aimed at improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people in the United Kingdom. LGBTIQ people in the UK have moved from being situated as “outlaws” – through prohibitions on homosexuality or cross-dressing – to respectable “in laws” – through the emerging acceptance of same-sex families and self-identified genders. From the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to the provision of a bureaucratic mechanism to amend legal sex in the Gender Recognition Act 2004, bringing LGBTIQ people “inside” the law has prompted enormous activist and academic commentary on the desirability of inclusion-focused legal and social reforms. Canvassing an array of current socio-legal debates on colonialism, refugee law, legal gender recognition, intersex autonomy and transgender equality, the contributing authors explore “queer outsiders” who remain beyond the law’s reach and outline the ways in which these outsiders might seek to “come within” and/or “stay outside” law. Given its scope, this modern work will appeal to legal scholars, lawyers, and activists with an interest in gender, sex, sexuality, race, migration and human rights law.