A shadow over democracy

The recent attempts to erase and further criminalize lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people in Uganda casts a shadow over all democracies, but especially those who have aggressively sought to silence the LGBTI community. A key tenet of democracy is representation for all citizens. If a country wishes to be recognized as a democracy, it must apply those rights to all its citizens without exception. 

Few might agree with the extremes that Ugandan parliamentarians have taken against their LGBTI community. However, other countries professing to be democracies and participating in the upcoming  White House Summit for Democracy have also silenced their LGBTI communities.  

Zambia, a country that scored only 7 percent on the LGBTQI Human Rights Report Cards (HRRC), is one of the five countries that will host regional meetings of the upcoming Summit. Recently, four women were arrested in Zambia for “holding a march against gender-based violence that police say was used to ‘champion homosexuality.’” Why should Zambia, with this record, be awarded the honor of hosting the Summit for Democracy? We hope Vice President Harris will raise this same question during her upcoming trip. 

Ghana, another country invited to the Summit for Democracy, and another country on the Vice President’s itinerary, has a pending anti-LGBTQI draft bill that would criminalize gender identity and intersex corrective therapy and imprison any person or group seen as promoting LGBTQI+ identities. Ghana was one of 11 countries that experienced backsliding on their LGBTQI Human Rights Report Card.

The report cards, created by the F&M Global Barometers in partnership with The Council for Global Equality, measure the extent to which countries provide legislative protection for their LGBTQI+ citizens. Countries are scored on three dimensions: Basic Rights, Protection from Violence, and Socio-Economic Rights. 

Unfortunately, Ghana and Zambia are not in the minority. Sixty percent of invited countries have earned a failing grade on the 2022 LGBTQI+ Human Rights Report Cards (HRRC).  Only four countries received a score of “A” or “Excellent”: Malta, Greece, Canada and Uruguay. Malaysia and Nigeria have the unenviable distinction of earning zero on their report cards.  

Legislation is not the sole indicator of a country’s success in protecting its most vulnerable citizens. We also compare the lived LGBTQI+ human rights reality with the legislative reality.  

Based on a six-question survey launched in the summer of 2022, the F&M Global Barometers LGBTQI+ Perception Index (GBPI) measured the lived human rights reality worldwide. The survey focused on safety, acceptance, police harassment, violence, safety in gathering and discrimination. The 167,000 responses reveal the lived realities of LGBTQI+ people are different from the legislative reality. 

For example, although Ghana and the United States earned a grade of “F” on their Report Cards, Ghana scored 34 percent on the GBPI and the United States scored a 70 percent. Malta scored a 100 percent (A) but its GBPI score was a 79 percent (C). 

However, Japan scored higher on the GBPI (74 percent) than on the HRRC (30 percent) because Japan has no specific laws in place to protect LGBTQI+ people from violence or socio-economic discrimination. While 30 percent is not a particularly high mark, it shows that despite the lack of legislative protections, LGBTQI+ people in Japan perceive their realities to be better than the legal protections they are denied. 

Comparing perception with the reality of legislation shows that the health of a democracy is closely linked to how fiercely a society protects its most vulnerable populations, including LGBTQI+ people. 

The Summit for Democracy provides an opportunity to send a strong message to countries who actively persecute their LGBTI citizens that this behavior is anti-democratic. Tolerance, acceptance and human decency are not Western values: They are human values and they are democratic values and they ought to be embraced by all. 

Attending nations are expected to share democratic values and norms and embrace fundamental universal human rights principles. However, many have failed to do so, especially when it comes to protecting some of their most vulnerable citizens. 

Susan Dicklitch-Nelson is professor of Government at Franklin & Marshall and founder and principal investigator of the F&M Global Barometers. Mark Bromely is a founding Co-Chair of the Council for Global Equality.