XV Edition GIZ Law Journal

AFRICAN UNION

AFRICAN UNION

The proposed indicators reflect on the stigma, violence, and discrimination against LGBTI people in various sectors of life: political participation, education, health, personal security and economic well-being. There is still only a small body of research on the lives of LGBTI people, hence why there is an urgent need for collecting data and assessing them against a baseline. Eventually, this shall contribute to a clearer picture about the living realities of LGBTI as well as an improvement of governmental policies to better include LGBTI people in all aspects of society. The pledge of the Agenda 2030/SDGs, namely to “leave no one behind”, makes questions of measurable inclusion a high priority, even though LGBTI people are not specifically mentioned in any of the goals. Of course, the Index itself could be used in many other ways that are aligned with those purposes. For example, the LGBTI Inclusion Index could be an outcome measure, and future research might look at the factors that facilitate or hinder LGBTI inclusion, such as a country’s degree of democracy or gender equity. Other studies might analyze whether the Index is a predictor of other outcomes, such as whether countries that are more inclusive of LGBTI people have stronger economies or better health overall. Finally, an important effect of creating an index will be to increase the demand for high quality data on LGBTI people. The data collected for the Index indicators can be used for many other kinds of more detailed studies of inclusion of LGBTI people in general or for groups within that population. Therefore, while the indicators in the LGBTI Inclusion

Index will be a broad measure of the general level of inclusion in a country at a point in time, the process of developing the Index is also likely to generate data that can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse experiences of LGBTI people within a country. So far, the development of the indicators involved three consultations: one virtual consultation with civil society, one virtual consultation with a group of multi-sectoral experts, and finally an in-person consultation of experts. After each consultation, the draft indicators were revised in response to feedback for the next round of consultation. The target for 2018 was to hold regional consultations in Asia, Africa and Latin America; the Africa one taking place in Pretoria/ South Africa in September 2018 with participants representing LGBTI community engaged in civil society organizations, litigation groups and research institutions from across the African continent as well as the ACHPR itself. GIZ was represented through the African Governance Architecture Programme (AGA) with support from the Sector Programme Human Rights (SV Menschenrechte) and the Human Rights Programme in Uganda. The ongoing developments regarding the LGBTI Index are an opportunity for GIZ to contribute to a sound strive, together with other development partners such as the UN, towards the implementation of SDGs at a global level and to potentially align and design programmes along those lines – not only, but particularly in Africa.

Title: The five dimensions of the LGBTI Inclusion Index, UNDP (2018)

Development of the LGBTI Inclusion Index It therefore came at a particularly timely moment that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had called for a regional consultation meeting in Africa to further elaborate a set of indicators for a global index to measure the inclusion of LGBTI people in societies. The process of creating the LGBTI Inclusion Index began in 2015, when UNDP, in partnership with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), convened meetings with a multi-sectoral group of experts and with representatives from civil society. In the light of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and Agenda 2030, such a reflection became necessary to picture the living conditions of LGBTI communities worldwide as the 17 SDG do not contain any specific reference or indicator to this cross-cutting question.

a result of their human rights protection activities, including the rights of sexual minorities” 33 . This becomes flagrant when the ACHPR published on 10th September 2018 its findings on the human rights situation in South Africa after having carried out a promotion mission on Human and People`s Rights according to their mandate. As one of the results, the ACHPR “remains concerned about violence and discrimination against the LGBTI community” 34 which seems contradictory seeing the ACHPR giving in to the political pressure of the AU only a few weeks earlier. Observing the CAL incident there is a need for an even bigger focus on monitoring the developments concerning LGBTI Rights on the African continent. With Egypt chairing the AU in 2019 and at the same time tending to outlaw same sex relationships domestically, the chances are small that the political environment at AU level might change in the short term.

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34 http://www.achpr.org/press/2018/09/d421/ (accessed 8 October 2018).