CARICOM heads of government urged to strengthen sexual rights
Posted By Stabroek staff On July 5, 2012 @ 5:10 am In Local | No Comments
Regional
civil society organizations
have called on the Caribbean Community heads of government at their July
4-6 summit in St Lucia to implement an Organization of American States
(OAS) General Assembly resolution on sexual orientation and gender
identity (SOGI) that every state supported last month.
They were also urged to fully join the Inter-American human rights system, according to a press release from the Caribbean Vulnerable Communities Coalition (CVC) yesterday.
CAFRA
(Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action), CariFLAGS
(Caribbean Forum for Liberation and Acceptance of Genders and
Sexualities) and the CVC were joined by NGOs, Society Against Sexual
Orientation Discrimination (SASOD) in Guyana, and United and Strong in
St. Lucia, where the meeting is being held.
The annual OAS SOGI resolution has been supported by every Caribbean state for the past five years, the release
stated.
Among several other actions, this year’s text calls
on member states to “consider, within the parameters of the legal
institutions of their domestic systems, adopting public policies against
discrimination by reason of sexual orientation and gender identityâ€
and to “consider signing, ratifying, or acceding to, as the case may
be, the inter-American human rights instrumentsâ€. “Other citizens in
the Americas have all these human rights protections guaranteed by
Inter-American regional instruments and mechanisms that millions of
CARICOM citizens simply do not enjoy,†SASOD’s Joel Simpson noted.
The
release said further that SASOD helped to pressure the Guyana
government through the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic
Review process to undertake a national consultation on whether the state
should continue to criminalize cross-dressing, and same-sex intimacy
between consulting adult men
in private.
“One has to wonder how committed our leaders are
when the region is so underdeveloped in terms of human rights. Human
rights protections are part of citizen security. We live in countries in
the hemisphere where the state’s local protective mechanisms are the
weakest and indicators of inequality, like access to justice and HIV
rates, are the worst. And our citizens don’t enjoy recourse to
regional bodies when our local protections fail,†Simpson stated.
Meanwhile,
the advocates also protested CARICOM’s marginalization of civil
society participation in regional governance and demanded a greater
voice in contributing to the future of the Caribbean.
“CARICOM
doesn’t yet have the simplest structures for routine civil society
participation, unlike most other regional institutions,†said
Trinidad-based Colin Robinson, who is leading the
private-public partnership to develop a region-wide human rights
advocacy network CariFLAGS.
CariFLAGS leaders include NGOs in Antigua, Belize, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The
advocates noted, however, that PANCAP (the Pan Caribbean Partnership
against HIV and AIDS), is one of the few regional mechanisms that
has genuinely sought to include civil society in its
governance.
CARICOM’s Head for Human Resources, Health and
HIV/AIDS, St. Kitts-Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas just last week
“endorsed a new complementarity in mission between the new Caribbean
Public Health Agency and PANCAP, with the latter sharpening its focus
on human rights, vulnerability and social justice, the release added.
“If
we’re serious about PANCAP’s commitment to human rights, what we
are asking are these two concrete steps by Heads of Government to
express that,†said St. Flavia Cherry of the St. Lucia-based CAFRA,
which is also campaigning to strengthen protection of sexual and
reproductive rights regionally.
Article printed from Stabroek News: http://www.stabroeknews.com
URL to article: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2012/news/stories/07/05/caricom-heads-of-government-urged-to-strengthen-sexual-rights/
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