Africa, Co-Sponsored by International Human Rights and on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues

Go Back

Session Type: Section Call for Papers

Session Capacity: 104

Location: New York Hilton Midtown

Room: New York Suite

Floor: Fourth Floor

This panel will explore the remarkable progress, and acute difficulties, in the struggle for LGBT rights in Africa. Much of its attention will go to South Africa, a country in which LGBT rights have received emphatic constitutional protection – but in which public attitudes, and often the realities of daily life, lag well behind constitutional guarantees. Activists in South Africa have made effective use of courts as a tool in their struggle, but doing so has entailed careful planning of incremental litigation and (on the judges’ side) careful decisions about when to rely on legislative actors to implement the constitution’s commands. Meanwhile, activists elsewhere in Africa face public attitudes at least as resistant as those in South Africa, but the challenges within any one country are magnified by the extent to which Africa is both the colonial inheritor and the present target of moral agendas pressed by those in the West. The presenters and commentators will explore these complex and troubling issues on this panel.