Reality check on SOGI at the Universal Periodic Review

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. | May 26, 2016

The 25th session of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) recently came to a close, with fourteen countries facing evaluation and recommendations on their human rights records from their fellow UN member states. Today, ILGA (the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) published a report summarizing the session. Their main message:

“Fourteen countries went under review during the 25th session of the Universal Periodic Review working group, held in May 2016, and all of them received recommendations related to sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) issues.”

I’ve written before about acronym expansion…it seems this pestilence continues to spread. In a word where LGBT has already mushroomed into LGBTQQIP2SAA, SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) seemed pleasantly concise, but apparently it’s no longer exhaustive enough.

Moving along to the claim that all fourteen countries under review received SOGI[…] recommendations: it’s true that Antigua and Barbuda, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Tanzania, Thailand and Trinidad and Tobago all did. But Tajikistan, not so much. Slovenia did ask a few questions that mentioned LGBT issues during the question-and-answer segment, but in the end, their recommendation to Tajikistan was:

“Conduct mandatory human rights training for law enforcement agencies, including training on hate crimes.”

While that could include LGBT issues as deemed nationally appropriate, it by no means has to. So when ILGA says all fourteen received SOGI[…] recommendations, that number follows the logic of hotel floor numbering: you can refer to thirteen as fourteen by adding a heaping spoonful of denial and a sprinkling of superstition.

But still, isn’t thirteen out of fourteen pretty high? Doesn’t that suggest that the SOGI[…] concept is widely accepted as a human rights category? Not necessarily. It turns out that out of the 193 countries that participate in the UPR, only a relatively small fraction of them make recommendations on SOGI[…]. 90% of all SOGI[…] recommendations originate from only 22 member states, and 36% of them come from just five countries: Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Slovenia. When five out of 193 countries account for more than a third of anything, it’s clearly not something that enjoys widespread support. The champions of SOGI[…] are certainly prolific, though: 164 member states have received recommendations on that issue—if Slovenia had been a bit more explicit in its recommendation to Tajikistan, that number would now be 165.

Another interesting aspect of the UPR is that recommendations can be “accepted” or just “noted” by their recipient country. As of the 22nd session of the UPR, SOGI[…] recommendations are accepted at a rate of about 37%, which drops to 23% acceptance when the recommendation calls for “specific action” such as a change in laws (as determined by UPR-Info’s criteria). For comparison, 74% of all recommendations in the UPR were accepted during the same time period, and 54% of “specific action” requests.

In summary, SOGI[…] recommendations are disproportionately churned out by a small group of countries and are far less popular with their recipients than other recommendations within the UPR system. Their champions may be powerful and persistent, but these statistics do not fit the description of a norm being accepted by the international community.

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