SPW Newsletter N.11 – March, 2012 - Sexuality Policy Watch

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:: Editorial

In 2012, as SPW completes its ten years of existence, we are engaged with an effort of reviewing our trajectory and products and exploring prospective paths. As part of this exercise, since 2011, we have been adjusting our communication and dissemination strategies. One change already implemented was to increase the frequency of regular announcements of new website postings. This shift required and adjustment in the format of SPW Newsletter.

Starting with this issue, the SPW newsletter will no longer provide detailed links to posted material, as they will have already been circulated through the announcements. Although the new editorial format still provides access links to the main sections of the website, the newsletter will mainly focus on one or two pieces of substantive analysis addressing one key debate and, eventually, one key event that we consider to be have been critical in the global sexual politics landscape in the period immediately preceding the publication. Partners and collaborators are invited to share their views on these topics.

Newsletter No 11 is devoted to two key topics: the ongoing debate around the validity of aid conditionality as an instrument to protect LGBT rights and the current state of affairs of abortion reform in Uruguay.

The first topic gained visibility in the last semester of 2011, when the UK government announced that it would resort to aid conditionality to protect LGBT rights in countries where they are poorly respected and this triggered conversations, and controversies, within and across LGBT rights communities North and South of the Equator. In our view, this apparently sudden eruption of aids conditionality must be situated in relation to the continuing geo-politicization of gender and sexuality observed since the 1990’s.

It is worth reminding, perhaps, that since the early 2000’s Southern feminists have been discussing the pros and cons of aid conditionality to support women’s rights. Also, even when many other urgent local and global events and debates have swept through LGBT rights listservs and other platforms, since David Cameron made his declaration, this idea and the risks and dilemmas it implies can not be said to have waned. For instance, the UN Secretary General — in his address to the March 7th, 2012, Human Rights Council inter-governmental panel on violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people — said he did not consider aid conditionality as the best way forward to prevent and eradicate violations.

The subject will be examined here by three SPW collaborators whom we dearly thank for the generosity: Hakima Abas, the Executive Director of Fahamu Network for Social Justice; Luis Abolafia Anguita, member of Fundación Triángulo, a Spanish LGBT organization wich works with development cooperation; and Radhika Balakrishna, Executive Director of the Center for Women Global Leadership (Rutgers University).

Our second topic, the state of art of the abortion reform in Uruguay, is one story SPW has been following systematically since 2007, when the previous law provision on sexual and reproductive rights was approved and them vetoed by President Tabaré Vasquez. However, a new law that decriminalizes abortion has been approved by the Uruguayan Senate on December 27th, 2011. The relevance of the unrelenting Uruguayan legislative debate is flagrant in a continent strewn with retrogressions in relation to abortion and women’s reproductive autonomy broadly speaking. If the new law is fully approved by the House of Representatives in the fore coming months, this will definitely signal a potential reversal of this regressive tide. Our dear and close partner Lilían Abracinskas, Director of Mujer y Salud en Uruguay (MYSU) has found time in her extremely tight agenda to share the story and prospects of the Uruguayan abortion reform. We also thank her enormously.

Good reading!

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:: Aid conditionality

>> Hakima Abbas, the Executive Director of Fahamu Network for Social Justice, wrote for the SPW Newsletter No. 11 the article Aid, resistance and Queer power, on the effects of the aid conditionality to the LGBTIQ issues in Africa. Read more.

>> Read the interview with Radhika Balakrishnan, the Executive Director and a Professor at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, about aid conditionalities to developing countries and its impacts on national human rights agenda.

>> Read the article Aid conditionality and respect for LGBT people rights, written by Luis Abolafia Anguita, from Fundación Triángulo, a Spanish LGBT organization wich works with development cooperation. The article debates the threats, reactions and effects of the recent initiative to reduce the development aid to countries that criminalize homosexuality [ALSO IN SPANISH].

Also on Aid conditionality

Aid and the China connection: Pink dollar, meet red renminbi (by Scott Long)
Sexuality, Development and continued colonialism (by Stephen Wood)
Aid conditionality and the limits of a politics of sexuality (by Akshay Khanna)

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:: Abortion in Uruguay

>> For the SPW Newsletter No 11, Lilián Abracinskas, director of Mujer y Salud en Uruguay (MYSU), wrote the article Abortion law reform in Uruguay: The state of art, presenting the current abortion reform in Uruguay, since the Uruguayan Senate has preliminarily approved, by 17 to 14 votes, a new text on the voluntary termination of pregnancy, which decriminalizes the practice up to 12 weeks, whenever the woman expresses her will to terminate the pregnancy. Read more [ALSO IN SPANISH].

Also on abortion