I was so delighted when I read Secretary of State Clinton's speech on 7 December to the UN Human Rights council. As a former Director, Global Issues, in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office I am usually pretty cynical about ministerial speeches but this one brought tears to my eyes. Not that Hillary Clinton said anything that hasn't been said a zillion times before about LGBT rights, but it was who said it and what she said the US would do to promote and protect LGBT rights.
The who is important because the USA still has huge power and influence. It's easy to criticise that power when it's used for something we don't like. But it can have a benign influence too and this is a great example. And an example that I think the UK should follow. Hillary Clinton announced a US government strategy to protect the rights of gay and lesbian people around the world and combat the criminalisation of homosexuality, to be supported by a new Global Equality Fund. She urged other countries to support it.
I remember representing the UK at a Gay and Lesbian Leadership conference in San Francisco in 2008 where I was invited to talk about the then UK government's work in promoting and defending LGBT rights. I had a good story to tell and my American audience were duly impressed. I ended my presentation with a plea that the USA join our work both in individual countries and in multinational fora like the UN. So, someone heard! More seriously, some of the credit belongs to our embassy and other like minded diplomatic colleagues in Washington who pressed the US government for a long time to treat the partners of lesbian and gay male diplomats as they did those of heterosexual diplomats. They finally succeeded.
Now it's our turn to follow the American lead. The British government has made its commitment clear. When the UK's new international LGBT rights group, the Kaleidoscope Trust, was launched earlier this year, David Cameron said he wanted Britain to be a 'beacon for reform' of LGBT rights around the world. There is much he could do to make good that promise.
We need to build on the ground-breaking work that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has already done in the past few years. A good start has been made in giving support to LGBT groups in other countries, advocating for their rights to the host country, pushing for supportive resolutions in multinational arenas, using ministerial visits to raise LGBT rights at the highest level in countries where those rights are under threat, and making clear public pronouncements about the UK's support for LGBT rights, as the Foreign Secretary did recently before the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Perth.
But we can and should do more. We need an over arching strategy which is able to take a global perspective as well as being sensitive to local LGBT views about how best the UK can exert influence in the right place and in the right direction. We need to ensure that our posts abroad learn lessons from each other in the way they use the excellent tool kit on LGBT rights that the FCO have developed for our diplomats. Lots of information flows into the FCO and what's needed is a specific FCO unit to coordinate it effectively so as to make the defence and promotion of LGBT rights a foreign policy priority that works.
I have not suffered for my sexuality as LGBT people in many countries in the world do but I did live in fear of losing my job for over half my career in the civil service because homosexuality was a bar to security clearance and I held a number of jobs which required that clearance. Had the fact that I was lesbian come out I would have been sacked. The bar was removed only in 1991. All I asked was that my right to be what I was born should be the same as anyone else's. And that I be judged in my job by my performance, not my sexual preference.
For other LGBT people in other countries their sexuality can be a matter of life and death and every effort needs to be expended to secure their rights as part of the global human rights framework. Governments have a vital role to play, so I am delighted by Hillary Clinton's speech; I look forward to seeing its results an
d I urge the British Government to show that it too is in the forefront of this noble cause.
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