“LGBTQI+ rights are human rights. And our government has a responsibility to defend them, to promote them – here and everywhere,” “- Anthony Blinken, US Secretary of State 

WE began this series of articles by referring to the eclecticism of human rights that makes them so diverse and rapidly changing in both their context and their conception. This diversity is supposed to apply to the various approaches and understandings of human rights emanating from such factors as diversity of belief systems, cultural or customary foundations of human rights, philosophical attributes of these rights and also national laws and legal frameworks that define the boundaries of the rights of citizens.

Despite such variations in conceptions and understandings of human rights, certain constructs around them have remained relatively constant.

The principles that have been enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR, nearly 76 years ago, have so far remained a permanent fixture in the global human rights systems whereby their immutability has contributed to the fashioning of beneficial policies around the idea that the promotion and protection of human dignity is a matter of the highest priority for all states to observe as their sovereign responsibility. The UDHR, therefore, still remains the touchstone or benchmark of the international human rights frameworks, by whose provisions the global community continues to be guided in both the policy and normative approaches to the protection and promotion of human rights.

The UDHR in no way detracts from the exercise of the full sovereignty of states in terms of making laws and deciding the postures and outlooks about human rights to adopt so long as the central tenets around them as spelled out in the Declaration are maintained and respected. The changing landscapes of human rights today, however, present the increasing possibilities of frictions and even conflicts between the requirements for states to promote and protect “all” human rights on one hand, and to maintain their prerogative as the sole sovereign entities bestowed with the rights and privileges to decide which “rights” should be recognised and enforced for the common good of “all” the citizens, on the other hand.

This dilemma is now increasingly being made apparent in the discourses on human rights in the United Nations system, where manifold processes are being introduced and radical innovations are constantly being formulated by different interests and viewpoints about what human rights should be. The confusion or dilemma is nowhere more apparent and sharply delineated as in the debates around the understanding of the concepts of the “family” and “gender” in the emerging human rights terminologies of the United Nations. The elasticity of meaning(s) attached to these two concepts in human rights discourses pose a dilemma as to what motivates our understanding of these terms. Recent events at the Paris Summer Olympics have exposed the limits of the tolerance of the international community as to the extent people could go in identifying with the emerging trends on sexual or gender identity regardless of biological attributes and natural formation of the physical body of persons.

It took an incident in the boxing ring between an Italian female fighter and a supposedly female Algerian athlete to expose this dilemma to the entire world to see. The identification of persons as “transgender” and other types of characterisations occasioned by the inclination to allow people to “express” their sexuality as part of their “inalienable rights” is bound to end up giving rise to some moral, ethical and philosophical concerns. On account of this pairing up of boxers in the same ring but with different physical constitutions, the meaning or definition of a woman or a female has now become a subject of both controversy and scandal.

Ordinarily, and under every conceivable situation, there should be no argument as to what a woman should be. But because of political and ideological propensities and the alarming dilution of the human rights concepts with other bohemian and outlandish notions, such an ordinary and commonsensical notion like a woman has now become a subject of heated discussion and controversy. The identification of sexes as mere constructs and not as biological realities should challenge us to stand up for what we know is right and oppose those trends that are now being forced on our countries by the Western dominated “human rights” machinery whose preponderance is now overwhelming the space in the United Nations. Where states are constrained or rendered unable to make decisive pronouncements regarding issues of identity, especially in relation to what constitutes the family or gender, the space is inevitably opened up for the introduction of other types of classifications that conflict with globally understood and recognised notions around these concepts.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is very clear and leaves no room whatsoever to ambiguity on what the family, men and women, etc, mean. Likewise, the other extant UN covenants on human rights are clear about those concepts and they do not conflict with the generally held understanding of their import. But recent manoeuvres in the UN seem to upset this universal position and introduce innovations into the existing frameworks by the inclusion of different typologies to the concept of the family and gender, to the detriment of ethical considerations as well as moral and cultural sensitivities. This is exactly the situation that is now going on in the United Nations where forceful intrusion of concepts that detract from the traditional understanding of the family and gender has now become the order of the day.

In a recent discussion in the United Nations in New York, the mere mention of “the family” became a heated issue among delegations. A meeting called to examine a draft outcome document on the proposed UN “Summit of the Future” to be held at the end of September 2024, became stalemated due to a disagreement on the import of the word “family” as conceived by the Western countries and their allies on the one hand, and other countries on the other. A majority of countries deemed it important to mention the role of the family in any future endeavours to ensure the well-being and security of coming generations.

Instead of agreeing on such a simple and innocent suggestion, some delegations with a radical agenda of human rights insisted that only the mention of “families” would be acceptable to them in the document if at all such a concept should be included in the text. The controversial language of the draft document reads “the role of families as contributors to sustainable development.” The idea that there are several versions of “family” naturally was not acceptable to the more traditional countries. The fact of whether “family” should be mentioned in singular or plural format has degraded discussions in the UN to the point of banality, thereby making a mockery of serious circumstances that member-states are supposed to address in solemn conclaves of their designated representatives.

Much of the disagreement was over how countries viewed the word “family” from their cultural and political perspectives. In its singular form, it connotes the union of men and women and the derivation of offspring from such a union to encompass a family. In its plural conception however, other types of unions are envisaged and allowed to be recognised, based on trending ideological and normative principles that have become acceptable in countries where same-sex marriages and other types of unions or cohabitations are recognised by law.

According a respectable American faith-based NGO, the Center for Family and Human Rights, C-FAM: “Western countries oppose references to the family in the singular because it reflects the language in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and binding human rights treaties about the natural family as ‘the natural and fundamental group unit of society’, understood as formed when a man and a woman freely choose to marry and create a family. Progressive countries view this terminology as outdated and non-inclusive of ‘different forms of the family,’ including same-sex unions”.

According to this report, a definition of the family that has officially existed for 75 years is to be overturned as “outdated” or “backward” for maintaining that there can be only one type of union that should be recognised as forming the foundation of societies. It is imperative that states that are traditionally inclined and are desirous of continuing to protect their core values which have been built around religious beliefs, cultural systems and national traits that are not in conflict with universally held outlooks on human rights and dignity, should endeavour to advance their viewpoints regarding the appropriate approaches to human rights discourses in the United Nations.

In doing so, the sovereign rights of states to decide the system of rights and privileges to espouse and protect must be superimposed on the emerging trend to promote human rights as a supranational concept over which states have little or no legal prerogative to adjucate and make independent decisions. The initiative by some states to launch the Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD) in 2020 must be viewed a positive step towards reiterating the sovereign rights of states to act on all matters within their jurisdiction that affect the well-being of their citizens.

The Declaration’s assertion of recognition of the family and the sovereignty of states is fundamental to the maintenance of balance and continuity in the international human rights normative frameworks and policy formulation at the national level. Nigeria and other African and developing countries of the world should therefore be mindful about the unfolding ideological conflict that is raging in the human rights arena, and take all necessary measures towards safeguarding their sovereign rights and national spaces from unwarranted intrusion from certain quarters that have other interests and intentions around the eapousal “human rights”.