Tom Daley, British Olympic diver and LGBTQ+ advocate, speaking via video link at the session

There is an erosion of LGBTQIA+ rights and equality in both law and practice around the world. This session explored the increasing criminalisation of homosexuality in relation to the rise of populist governments around the globe.

Baroness Helena Kennedy LT KC, IBAHRI Director, London (HK): This showcase was conceived two years ago. It's been in the making for some time, because we believed very strongly then, we were getting a sense of a trajectory that was rather worrying. And the trajectory was that we were seeing an increase in authoritarian governance in so many parts of the world and in so many countries. A move towards less generous and inclusive policies and really an erosion of many of the gains that had been made in recent years. The trajectory which often comes with authoritarianism is to erode liberal values, values of inclusion, values which are against discrimination and we see often the rise of ideas about othering of people, particularly of minorities. We've seen a global wave of discriminatory behaviour and we've seen it affecting women and women's rights, we've seen it affecting immigrants and the whole asylum and refugee system, but we've also seen a wave of discriminatory practice against the LGBT+ community.

But what we have seen is a growing erosion of the rights of peoples. And it has been really appalling to watch, to see homosexuality being recriminalised in some places and criminalised in places where it had never been criminal before. It's criminalised in 65 countries globally currently, and in 12 of those countries the death penalty is either enforced or remains a possibility for same sex relationships. I just wanted to say that this is about the human desire to be loved and to love. And how could anybody stand in the way of that? It seems so utterly shameful in this modern world.

Tom Daley, British Olympic diver and LGBTQ+ advocate, London (TD): One of the reasons why so much stuff has rolled back of late is, I think, social media, [which] has a huge role to play in that because everybody very much lives within their bubble of social media and the algorithms are feeding people what they want to hear from like-minded people rather than expanding those points of view. And there is no fact checking with any of the stuff on social media. I know people are working on trying to have more fact checking, but they're not held to the same standards that the traditional media is held to when it comes to fake news and spreading things that can be really harmful with misinformation.

that is really important and trying to have open conversations And I think in last few years, there's been a lot of cancel culture when it comes to if you say the wrong thing or if you ask the wrong question, you should know better and then people get shut down. And I think it's really important that we create safe spaces for people to ask the right questions and to be able to have those conversations without feeling that they're saying the wrong thing. Being able to tell your story from the heart has the possibility of changing hearts and when you can change hearts, that's when you start to change minds. And when you start to change minds, that is when the law changes happen.

Adam Goldenberg, McCarthy Tétrault, Toronto (AG): In 2023, the province of New Brunswick changed a policy that applied to its K-12 education system, which had previously required educators, or at least allowed educators, to refer to students by their chosen names and pronouns, even in the absence of parental consent.

The now-previous government of New Brunswick changed that policy to require parental consent before a student could be known by their chosen name or pronouns. However, that policy was changed back. So, New Brunswick is now back in line with most of Canadian provinces in not legislating or regulating in this area in a manner that is detrimental to the rights of queer young people. Alberta and Saskatchewan, however, very sadly, followed the lead of New Brunswick with escalating levels of severity. Saskatchewan was next, and its provincial government brought in a policy that's similar to the one in New Brunswick [and] required the educators of that province to obtain parental consent before referring to a student by their chosen name or pronouns. Alberta has gone further than either of the two other provinces that I mentioned. It enacted a prohibition not only on chosen names and pronouns [and] on the participation of trans youth in sports according to their gender identities, but it also enacted legislation that would prohibit the provision of gender-affirming care to young people.

This is the first jurisdiction in Canada to follow the lead of something like 28 states in the United States to restrict access to gender-affirming care for young people. We sought and obtained an injunction against that law in June of this year, just in time for the end of Pride Month, and that law remains not in effect by virtue of that injunction.

Conservative politicians in Canada have proven just as susceptible to indulging the sort of populist anti-rights rhetoric that we've seen in the United States, albeit to a far lesser degree. We've only seen, as I say, moves in this direction in three provinces out of the ten across the board.

Georgia Dawson, Freshfields, London (GD): By way of general observation, the rise of populism is having an effect in domestic politics, and that is then playing through in slightly different ways in each of those parts of the world, some more dramatically than others. Over the last decade or so we saw incredible change and positive progress in the Hong Kong market. I wouldn't suggest at the moment that there's been a regression from that in recent times, I think it's just been a failure to take further steps forward.

If you move to Singapore, it started out in a less progressive position than Hong Kong with colonial laws on the books, criminalising same sex unions or same sex relationships. There was a constitutional challenge to that. The constitutional challenge was unsuccessful, but it did ultimately force a conversation in Singapore and the legislation was changed so some good progress there. But again, a failure to take the next logical step recently where there was the introduction this year of a workplace fairness act, but the government chose not to include sexual orientation or gender identity as the basis of discrimination.

If you turn to Australia there's some new amendments to the relevant equality legislation, which is broadly positive in terms of advancing the rights of the LGBT+ community. There's also government initiatives and action plans to ensure ongoing and continuing progress and other state governments, like in Western Australia, looking at reforming legislation that relates to conversion practises, assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy. Not yet formalised, not yet concluded, but at least some steps in the right direction there.

If I move now, however, to the UK, it's a bit more of a mixed picture. And obviously, the Supreme Court decision from April of this year, which I think is viewed broadly within those of us that are supportive of advancing LGBT+ rights as a step backwards. However, coming alongside that, there's also a number of other developments in the UK that ensure that this topic remains front of mind and is progressing. So, for example, significant budget allocations within the UK but also for the UK's international efforts on LGBT+ rights. There's a new piece of legislation from June of this year, or an amendment I should say, to the Crime and Policing Bill, which elevated anti-LGBT+ hate crimes to aggravated offences, which they weren't previously, so putting them on par with race and religious hate crimes.

Njeri Gateru, National Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Nairobi (NG): I work for a feisty little organisation called the National Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission. We're based in Nairobi, and our work generally is to imagine and try to bring into fulfilment a universe that we imagine for equals and the opportunity for equal happiness for queer people in Kenya. And the ways that we know how to do that is by using the law. We do strategic litigation, which is quite possibly the more outward-facing bodies of work that we have engaged in. And in the last ten to 12 years, we have been very successful in pushing specific issues along our courts. We've been successful at banning the practise of forced anal examinations as a way to obtain evidence against people who are suspected to be homosexual, bisexual or transgender, and then using that evidence in criminal charges against these people. Remember, Kenya is one of the 65 countries that still retains criminal laws against people of same sex and same gender love. We're also currently litigating towards decriminalisation of private same-sex sexual conduct.

One of the other issues that we've been very intentionally litigating on is the right to education. And in Kenya, there's been a very, very deliberate effort to deny LGBTIQ+ learners access to education, either by ministerial pronouncements attempting to burn learners who are accused of being LGBTIQ from accessing boarding schools. And so what has happened with these wins that we've had in court, is that we have seen so much backlash, where we realised quite quickly that there had been a well-structured mobilising by their anti-gender and anti-rights movements, focusing particularly in Africa.

What has happened is that in the last two or three years we have seen a very specific template of anti-LGBTIQ law that has been sold into African parliaments. The language that exists in those bills and acts seeks majorly to recriminalise homosexuality, but then also bring in new ways and new frontiers of criminalisation and of separation of identities. For example, the Kenyan version of the Family Protection Bill has a range of new prescriptions for imprisonment ranging between life imprisonment for aggravated homosexuality and different versions of punishments for various other forms of homosexuality.

Frank Mugisha, SMUG International, Kampala (FM): Uganda is well known for these extreme laws and bringing up the worst extreme laws for LGBTQ persons. But we work with a very robust community [and] lawyers now who work with us on a daily basis. I've been at the forefront of almost all this litigation. We had the first 'kill the gays' bill that we successfully challenged on procedural grounds. We had a lot of substance to argue, but then the judiciary decided to give us the ruling on only one of their grounds, that when the law was being introduced in Parliament, we didn't have enough members of parliament, so we won that.

We had a Ghana newspaper that was very notorious in publishing names and pictures of activists and individuals and outing them. It's very important that our litigation works hand in hand with advocacy. Before we bring up this litigation, we work so hard with communities to make sure there's no backlash. We were able to get an injunction. The newspaper was stopped from publishing names and pictures of LGBTQ persons. We have an ongoing litigation where we are challenging Minister of Ethics and Integrity for closing down our workshop because under our constitution we are allowed to assemble.

We are currently litigating against the anti-homosexual law 2003. This law has aggravated homosexuality, which carries the death penalty. This law punishes promotion of homosexuality up to 20 years in prison. That means my speech, holding this meeting, what I write on social media could amount to promotion of homosexuality. This law that the anti-LGBTQ groups, the conservative groups, they say they bring up this legislation to protect children. But this law would punish an LGBTQ child who is under the age of 18 with up to three years in prison. Under our law, that is the maximum for a juvenile. They're giving a juvenile simply for expressing their sexuality or because normalisation of homosexuality is punishable. I think in conclusion, I would say I want to talk about the fighting back. Fighting back has been through strategic litigation simply because extreme anti-LGBTQ groups and anti-racist groups have got so much impunity.

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This is an abridged version of ‘Rejecting the rights rollback – advancing LGBTQIA+ equality around the world’ session. The filmed session can be viewed in full here.