The latest U.S. State Department human rights report has some gay activists calling on the government to heed its own advice and impose sanctions on countries that target gay citizens with abuse.
Each year, the State Department issues a human rights report detailing abuse committed by foreign governments, including abuse motivated by victims’ sexual orientation and gender identity.
Gay rights advocates applauded the 2005 report, released last week, for its detailing of anti-gay abuses committed in a range of countries, including Iran, Poland, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates.
"I was glad to see [the report] talked about issues of discrimination," said Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program at Human Rights Watch.
Past reports, he said, "were willing to address egregious persecution but not everyday life."
The violations detailed in the report range from criminalizing homosexuality in Nigeria to banning gay rights parades in Warsaw, Poland, to the murders of gay rights and AIDS activists in Jamaica.
The report also criticized Nigeria for health care and employment discrimination against HIV-positive people. The public, the report stated, believes HIV is "a result of immoral behavior."
The United Arab Emirates, recently in the news because of the attempted takeover of some U.S. port operations by the UAE-owned company Dubai Ports World, criminalizes homosexuality. The UAE was cited in the State Department report for arresting 26 gay men and reportedly giving them hormone treatments to change their sexual orientation.
While homosexuality is not illegal in Nepal, the report states, police still harass and abuse gays.
It is unclear what criterion is used to define abuse, as some human rights violations-—-like criminalizing sodomy-—-were the law of the land in a dozen U.S. states until a Supreme Court decision in 2003.
The State Department declined comment on the report.
The report’s inclusiveness of gay-related abuse can help asylum seekers who must prove persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity in their home country, said Chris Nugent, a D.C. attorney who specializes in gay asylum cases.
The report "is a vital source of information concerning treatment," said Nugent. "It’s relied on by immigration adjudicators as evidence of human rights conditions abroad."
While the report may help asylum seekers, it is less clear what it will mean for U.S. domestic policy and relationships with other countries. The State Department is required by law to issue the reports, which are supposed to help determine funding granted to foreign countries, said Elisa Massimino, D.C. director of Human Rights First, a human rights advocacy group.
Countries with egregious records of human rights violations are not supposed to receive certain types of aid, she said.
"The consequences are what the U.S. government makes of them," said Human Rights Watch’s Long, who claimed his group helped compile some of the anti-gay abuses chronicled in the report.
The report’s inclusiveness of gay rights, Long said, "stands in conspicuous contrast to the vote at the U.N."
The U.S. recently sided with Iran and Cameroon to block two gay rights groups from having consultative status at the U.N., which allows involvement in discussions with member countries. Nearly 3,000 groups have consultative status, according to Human Rights Watch.
The report "doesn’t seem to conform with the administration’s own record," agreed Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
While the report acknowledges the egregiousness of anti-gay abuses, Ettelbrick said, "the bad news is [the U.S.] doesn’t seem to be applying that standard to the U.S. government."
"The State Department report is enlightening but it won’t be effective if the U.S. government keeps siding with abusers like Iran in supporting silencing human rights watchers," HRC President Joe Solmonese said in a statement.
"Countries like the U.A.E. are abusing men and women and the best the U.S. government can do is give them a multimillion dollar contract to manage our ports," he said. "We should be demanding accountability for human rights violations, not simply turning a blind eye toward the problem."
There also is the problem of credibility because of the United States’ own human rights record, which is absent from the report, several activists noted.
In the past year there has been international outcry over U.S. policies to torture and indefinitely detain suspects, as well as the policy of "rendition," or sending a foreign suspect to a third country for interrogation. Critics have alleged that some terrorism suspects are sent abroad to be tortured.
These charges are missing from the country reports, even for those countries where suspects were sent, noted Massimino of Human Rights First.
Human Rights First conducted critiques of the State Department reports from 1978 until 1996 and then in 2003, when it saw that the State Department instructed embassies not to report actions requested by the U.S., she said.
Despite this instruction, the report remained thorough, unlike earlier years that were influenced by U.S. foreign policy, she said.
But the United States’ own record should not deter the government from condemning human rights violations abroad, Long said.
"The U.S.’ moral authority was progressively eroded by things like the images of Abu Ghraib," he said. "But the erosion of authority doesn’t detract from their authority to speak out."
Other countries will use U.S. human rights violations to justify their own, Scott said. For instance, he said, both Uganda and Nigeria passed anti-gay marriage laws in the past year.
"Uganda is one of the largest recipients of [U.S.] AIDS funding," he said. "They are very attentive to policies at home. If [the U.S.] throws the principle of equality out the window, it resonates everywhere."
