Even as a growing number of foreign governments commit to protecting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) people, others are actively marshaling their resources against them. From the Hungarian government’s legal and political attacks on LGBTQI+ people to Iraqi legislation that punishes those who “promote homosexuality” and increases criminal penalties and fines for same-sex relations, the negative trends are significant and concerning.
In many places, politicians blame LGBTQI+ people for a wide array of societal ills to boost their popularity at home and their geopolitical interests abroad, distracting from the real economic, social, and political challenges their countries face. In Georgia, for example, the ruling party may have used anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric to manipulate the political landscape ahead of elections. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, a country long considered relatively welcoming for LGBTQI+ people in the Middle East, one activist described a political leader’s rhetoric as “the manufacturing of a moral panic in order to justify a crackdown, and to deviate public attention away from their unpopular policies.”
Although human rights are seen by some as a lower-priority foreign-policy issue for the United States than so-called hard security threats, the failure to protect them abroad can have significant negative consequences for U.S. interests. Now more than ever, the United States needs to push back against foreign-government repression of LGBTQI+ rights while also doing this work at home. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it recently, this matters “not just because we have a moral imperative to do so,” but because doing so “helps strengthen democracy, bolster national security, and promote global health and economic development.”
Across a range of issues, it’s clear that anti-LGBTQI+ policies and rhetoric can cause significant damage to many of the United States’ top foreign-policy priorities.
To start, efforts to repress LGBTQI+ rights are often a canary in the coal mine for more severe persecution to come. A 2022 report found, for example: “From Nazi Germany to genocide in Darfur to the breakup of former Yugoslavia, the imposition of ‘moral’ codes that directly assault sexual and gender identities and freedoms came before widespread state-led physical violence and atrocity crimes.”
The targeting of LGBTQI+ people can also be a precursor to, or occur alongside, abuses against other vulnerable populations. The Taliban-promoted sexual assault of and life-threatening attacks on LGBTQI+ people, for example, have occurred concurrently with brutal restrictions on women’s and girls’ participation in education, work, and other aspects of public life. Likewise, vicious torture of gay men in the Russian Republic of Chechnya has taken place against a wider backdrop of long-term human rights abuses by Chechen authorities.
Erosion of LGBTQI+ human rights can also signal and exacerbate the breakdown of democratic norms and institutions, including restrictions on independent media and judicial review, serving as a bellwether for the state of civil society more generally. Russia’s recent detention and prosecution of LGBTQI+ people have paralleled its crackdown on independent journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society.
Countries in which the human rights of LGBTQI+ people are less respected also frequently have greater levels of corruption, partly because discriminatory legal regimes create barriers to reporting wrongdoing by corrupt officials, making LGBTQI+ people an easy target for extortion. Corruption, in turn, compounds other pressing problems: It degrades the business environment, drives migration, and impedes responses to public health crises and climate change. States with endemic corruption are also more vulnerable to terrorist networks, transnational organized crime, gang-related criminal actors, and human traffickers. This is, in part, because threats to transparent and accountable governance are among the root causes of radicalization, and restrictions on LGBTQI+ and other civil society organizations reduce the capacity of those groups to mitigate the conditions conducive to violent extremism, terrorism and other criminal activity.
Not only are anti-LGBTQI+ policies a drag on economic growth, but they are also detrimental to public health. Punitive laws fan the flames of stigma and discrimination, in turn making vulnerable communities reluctant to seek life-saving and public health-protecting services. Across 10 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, HIV prevalence in countries that criminalize homosexuality is five times higher among men who have sex with men than in countries without those laws.
Taken together, the failure to protect LGBTQI+ people’s human rights can create disastrous effects for U.S. interests. State-sponsored discrimination and violence undercut the United States’ tremendous investments in international anti-corruption efforts, counter-terrorism programs, economic development, and public health. And, as the COVID-19 pandemic made clear, a disease threat anywhere can quickly become a disease threat everywhere. The same can be said for terrorism, corruption, and economic instability. When governments target LGBTQI+ people, they also increase the chances that the symptoms and consequences of this repression will spread in their communities and across borders.
Given the stakes, it is crucial that the United States uses the tools and powers it has to promote accountability for human rights abuses and mitigate their harms to U.S. citizens and businesses.
In this respect, the recent heightened repression by the Ugandan government is illustrative. In May 2023, Uganda signed into law the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA), which mandated the death penalty for certain “serial” offenses and a 20-year prison sentence for the mere “promotion” of homosexuality. Although the legislation was decried by human rights advocates, it was lauded by some of Uganda’s geopolitical partners as evidence of shared interests. Shortly after the legislation was passed, the late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Uganda and made the unfortunately common—and demonstrably inaccurate—claim that homosexuality is a Western import. He also identified opposition to Western support for LGBTQI+ people as “another area of cooperation for Iran and Uganda.” In similar fashion, an editorial on the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad website summarized the law as “a geopolitical victory [for Russia], which they see as the direct result of years of their hard, methodical work [on a] global anti-LGBTQ hate campaign.”
The AHA was the final, egregious straw amid an ongoing decline in respect for human rights, including of LGBTQI+ people, and democratic backsliding in Uganda, and the United States’ response was swift and comprehensive. Underscoring the link between the violation of the human rights of LGBTQI+ people and broader harms to American interests, U.S. President Joe Biden described the law as part of an “alarming trend of human rights abuses and corruption.” The United States issued a business advisory; updated the U.S. Travel Advisory and Country Information Page for Uganda; expanded existing visa restrictions to include those repressing vulnerable populations, such as human rights advocates, LGBTQI+ people, and environmental defenders; supported the World Bank’s decision to pause Uganda’s access to new funds; and imposed sanctions on the Commissioner General of the Uganda Prisons Service for widespread violations of human rights, including credible reports of physical abuse of political opposition and LGBTQI+ people. President Biden also determined that Uganda did not meet the eligibility requirements of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), “on the basis of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
Although the law remains in place, these actions and international attention have had effect: Uganda’s government has not conducted widespread roundups of or ordered death sentences against LGBTQI+ people. But violence, abuse, and evictions have increased in the country, and arrests of LGBTQI+ people have persisted and likely risen under an earlier, colonial-era law that criminalizes same-sex conduct.
As the situation in Uganda demonstrates, the United States has options to respond to foreign governments that fail to uphold their human rights obligations. These measures can be unilateral, as is the case for issuing travel advisories or removing trade preferences, or multilateral, which could involve working with the United Nations, the World Bank, or other multilateral institutions. They can also be affirmative, as opposed to punitive—for instance, expanding humanitarian and development assistance for human rights defenders and mobilizing private sector capital to support businesses that operate consistent with international non-discrimination standards.
As with all diplomatic efforts to address wrongdoing, the choice among these options will vary depending on circumstances, such as whether a government is launching a new campaign against LGBTQI+ people or has an older but little-enforced criminal law on its books. Inevitably, the importance of raising human rights concerns will be weighed against other U.S. priorities, and human rights will not always prevail. However, increasingly, LGBTQI+ issues are being integrated into bilateral relationships, even when doing so is not easy and when quiet diplomacy is the only option. In all circumstances, consultation with LGBTQI+ civil society must be prioritized in weighing the benefits and risks of action to ensure that efforts do not contribute to backlash or negative repercussions for LGBTQI+ people on the frontlines of global human rights movements.
In a recent State Department convening on LGBTQI+ rights in U.S. foreign policy, Secretary Blinken made our commitment clear, telling civil society leaders: “Our promise is this: We will be with you every step of the way. We’ll persevere with you. We’ll listen to you. We’ll learn from you. We’ll help resource and support your fight. And we’ll bring our strength together with yours so that finally together we can build a world where all people are genuinely free—free to be who they are, free to love who they love.”
Although this work may have been in the spotlight during Pride month, it requires our focus year-round. Indeed, our national security depends on it.
