UN Human Rights Office to Litigate LGBT and Abortion in Latin America

By | December 17, 2021

NEW YORK, December 17 (C-Fam) The UN human rights office has launched a new initiative to promote judicial activism on gender issues in Central and South America, including abortion and the LGBT agenda.

The UN human rights office established an organization to promote strategic litigation, legal reforms, and legal education on gender issues in Central and South America, regions where laws remain highly protective of children in the womb. While the organization, called the Latin American Network for Gender-based Strategic Litigation, focuses mostly on violence against women, it also promotes abortion as an international right following the recommendations of the UN human rights bodies.

The UN report on which the organization’s work is based describes “access to safe and legal abortion” as a human right and calls on advocates across Latin America to promote the denial of abortion as a criminal act of “reproductive violence.”

“To change laws, judicial practice, and the patriarchal culture that surrounds the investigation and punishment of crimes of sexual and gender based violence remains the central challenge,” said the coordinators of the group and American University professors Susana SáCouto and Claudia Martin in a blog.

The website of the organization promotes the rulings of Latin American courts promoting abortion as models to be followed, including controversial cases that have been dubbed judicial activism, or attempts by judges to impose their policy preferences in disregard of the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives.

Despite much international pressure, Central and Latin America remain stubbornly pro-life, and democratic votes as well as referendums on abortion tend to yield pro-life results. That is why abortion advocates and the governments who back them are turning more and more to the judiciary and law-enforcement, even if this technically is a form of interfering in the internal affairs of countries, something prohibited by the UN Charter.

The initiative of the UN human rights office is only the latest effort of the UN office and powerful western countries to train judges, lawyers, activists, and law-enforcement personnel in the region to promote abortion.

Several UN agencies have long promoted the notion that denial of abortion should be a crime under international law. Ongoing programs from the UN human rights office as well as other programs carried out in the region with money from western donors link gender-based violence with the enforcement of abortion laws.

According to a 2014 Latin American Model Protocol for the investigation of gender-related killings of women prepared by the UN agencies, “deaths due to unsafe or clandestine abortions” should be considered “passive or indirect category of femicides.”

The UN rights office and UN agencies run workshops in the region for legal and law-enforcement personnel every year, according to reports prepared by the UN human rights office. In Central America, the regional offices of the UN human rights bureaucracy routinely promote abortion. And internal evaluations of the UN human rights office praise the role of “gender advisors” within the UN bureaucracy for promoting abortion and the LGBT agenda in Latin America and across the world.

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