At the United Nations (UN) in New York this week [September 25], heads of state from around the world will officially adopt ‘The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. This includes the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their associated targets. Diplomats concluded the final agreement in early August, after a frantic round of negotiations characterized by several sordid last-minute compromises.
Advocating for human rights at UN development talks in New York has always been an uphill struggle. There is no shortage of rhetorical commitment to human rights, but the reality is that—more than a decade after the ‘human rights approach to development’ was in theory mainstreamed across the UN—most New York diplomats (and many UN staffers) still have very little understanding of human rights, and don’t necessarily see the links between human rights and development.
It was, therefore, not particularly surprising, although still disappointing, to see references to human rights in the SDGs become a bargaining chip at the eleventh hour. As the talks moved into the final weekend in August, the draft text included a very strong recognition that the realization of all human rights is a principal aim of sustainable development, and an explicit commitment to non-discrimination on any basis. However, two negotiating blocs of member states—the African Group and the Arab Group—raised fervent (and legally incoherent) objections to this language. They demanded that the prohibition of discrimination on any ‘other status’, included at the end of the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination (such as sex, race, religion, etc), be removed, even though it has been present in UN treaties since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sadly, it seems this was motivated by the desire to avoid recognizing the rights of LGBT people. (They also insisted that every use of ‘gender equality’ be followed by language about the empowerment of women and girls, to avoid the implication that it might refer to equality on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity). It is disconcerting that we are still fighting these battles in the halls of the UN, more than two decades since the interdependence of human rights and development was reaffirmed at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, and more than twenty years since the UN human rights system first recognized sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited grounds of discrimination.
