U.S. and EU Hold Food Relief Hostage to LGBT Agenda

By | October 21, 2022

ROME, October 21 (C-Fam) Conservative countries blocked a UN agreement on a set of international guidelines on gender and food security because it included homosexuality and transgender issues.

The UN body tasked with coordinating global efforts to help countries address food shortages had to postpone an agreement because the U.S. and the European Union insisted on the inclusion of homosexuality and transgender. Indonesia, China, Russian Federation, Sudan, Cameroon, Malaysia and the Holy See, among others, objected.

The Biden administration and the European Union promised that they would only accept an agreement that included terms such as “multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination”, “women in all their diversity,” and “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

While not explicitly about homosexual and transgender issues, these terms are defined by Western agencies and UN programs as requiring programming that promotes and accepts homosexuality and transgenderism.

Western countries had the backing of the UN human rights office. In an unusual move, the UN human rights office submitted a written intervention claiming that homosexuality and transgender issues had been settled and accepted in General Assembly resolutions. The UN General Assembly has never accepted those terms, however.

“In the negotiations, there was confusion on the content of the principle of nondiscrimination,” reads the statement of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “The UN General Assembly, in its resolution 67/168, recognized sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited grounds for discrimination,” it continues.

The statement did not refer to the over 50 countries that have consistently opposed the language in that resolution and 58 countries that voted against the inclusion of “sexual orientation and gender identity” in a General Assembly resolution on elections last December. Every time these terms are negotiated, they cause a stir among UN delegations and cannot be said to be settled. Far from it, they are among the most contentious in UN debates.

The statement went further, calling on governments to defer to UN human rights experts.

“The Office would like to highlight that the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies have been interpreting the principle of non-discrimination and equality as to include discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status,” he said, referring to the non-binding opinions of UN experts as if they were authoritative or binding on states.

UN human rights treaties do not refer to “sexual orientation and gender identity.” UN human rights experts argue that these notions should nevertheless be accepted as human rights categories alongside widely accepted categories of non-discrimination like race, sex, and religion.

Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, who was present in Rome, insisted that countries should abide by the non-binding opinions of UN experts.

The Committee on World Food Security agreed to continue negotiations on the “Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in the Context of Food Security and Nutrition” in coming months, in the hope of reaching an agreement at the next session of the committee in 2023.

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