The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), a UN body that oversees UN human rights programs on the implementation of international human rights agreements, held a meeting in Bangkok from February 21-22, 2013, to follow up Southeast Asian countries on the recommendations (Read: UPR Recommendations to the Philippines). One of the recommendations is the adoption of a comprehensive national anti-discrimination legislation that will protect LGBTs.
Below is my intervention during the session on sexual orientation and gender identity:
The initiative to enact a legislation that prohibits discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders has started in 1999 through a civil society-led effort to engage in legislative advocacy as a strategy to promote LGBT rights. The bill was first filed in 1999 by then Congresswoman Etta Rosales, who is now the Chair of the Commission on Human Rights. It went through five congressional terms already, and has undergone several committee hearings, technical working groups, plenary debates already; each congressional term a repetition of the same cycle. It has been the subject of three recommendations already from the UN treaty mechanisms. For fourteen years, we’re been saying that the bill is pending is Congress.
Pending for fourteen years. If the anti-discrimination bill were a child, a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender child, he or she would have already faced the stigmatized realities of Filipino LGBTs. These include the possibility of physical abuse or even sexual abuse (or corrective rape) from parents, relatives, or neighbors who think that abuse is a remedy for homosexuality. He or she would have already encountered bullying and harassment in school. If the child is perceived to be lesbian, too butch to be a girl, she would have been kicked out from a Church-run school. If the child were a boy, he would have already faced the stigma around gay sex, one which would steer him towards sexual behaviors that would put him at risk of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, the incidence of which is rapidly rising among children and among young males having sex with males.
When we talk about the UPR’s recommendation for a comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation to protect LGBT rights, a recommendation echoed by the UN Human Rights Committee in its findings after the ICCPR review, we need to underscore the importance of the proposed legislation beyond the fulfillment of our treaty obligations – that it is necessary to curb a climate of stigma and discrimination that undermines the exercise and enjoyment of human rights for many Filipino LGBTs. It is meant to penalize and stop a wide range of discriminatory attitudes and policies in different sectors, from education and healthcare to public office and employment. It prohibits abuse by law enforcers and penalizes unethical and harmful reparative psychiatric therapies that claim to ‘cure’ homosexuality.
The Anti-Discrimination Bill is all about basic fairness, about equality, and no one goes against equality, at least not officially. To be fair, compared to his predecessor, President Noynoy Aquino said that while he cannot support same-sex marriage, he believes that discrimination must be eliminated, and this provides guidance on where the government stands. In the recent ICCPR review for the Philippines, the Philippine government readily accepted a UN Human Rights challenge to champion LGBT rights in the region, and recognized the need to legislate protection for the rights of LGBT people. In different platforms, you see the same excited support by government officials for the bill.
But the gap between rhetoric and action remains wide. Such commitments did not translate to the passage of the anti-discrimination bill. This congressional term, the provisions of the bill were incorporated in a broader anti-discrimination measure that was approved by the Senate on third reading. A different version was approved by the House, but it was willing to adopt the SOGI provisions included in the Senate version. Unfortunately, the bicameral committee that was tasked to harmonize the two bills did not convene, and up to the last day of the session, we were trying to pressure the Chair of the Senate panel to have the bill approved, to no avail. This is the closest we have ever gone to having the bill approved, but the lack of political will triumphed.
While the bill is stagnating in Congress, momentum is building for a downscaled local anti-discrimination legislation in local governments. Several major cities, specifically QC, Cebu, Davao and Angeles has enacted anti-discrimination ordinances, most of which mirror the content of the national bill. National legislation is still necessary, however, because local ordinances, by law, have limited scope.
There are several lessons in this protracted struggle that we can use to move forward. First, the responsibility of enacting the measure doesn’t solely rest on the legislature. The political inertia in Congress is not a deadend and all branches of government should own the problem and see stigma and discrimination against LGBTs as a threat to human rights. While legislation is the role of Congress, nothing prevents the Executive, which also has broad powers, from creating a policy environment conducive to the enactment of the measure. It can direct government agencies to ensure that they have their own anti-discrimination policies, or programs on LGBT rights, for instance, or even issue policy pronouncements indicating that it is against SOGI-based stigma and discrimination. It is true that the absence of a national legislation is challenge, but it does NOT make the State powerless in addressing discrimination. There have seen some efforts on the part of the government to engage LGBT groups, but it must scale up its actions.
Second, the LGBT community must be strengthened to improve their capacity to influence public opinion and engage political institutions. This political inertia builds on a prevailing bias against homosexuality, which can be cured if and when the community is also able to mobilize to educate the public and change their perception of LGBTs. LGBT advocacy may have started early in the Philippines, but support for LGBT groups’ organizational capacity remains poor.
Third, an effective approach may be to frame discrimination against LGBTs as a manifestation of a bigger problem of marginalization of many communities. The anti-discrimination ordinance of Cebu City, which was enacted last year, is a comprehensive local law that protects other populations vulnerable to discrimination – people with disability, senior citizens, indigenous communities, PLHIV, etc. – and thus making it easier to put the law in the context of universal human rights.
The last three years were a watershed for human rights in the Philippines, with the enactment of many measures that guarantee human rights, even controversial ones such as the reproductive health law. Yet it was also a moment of exclusion, and while we are grateful that the government has made progress in good governance and human rights, we must say that there are Filipinos who, because of their sexual orientation and gender identity, are left bind.
xfullman 