When Geneva heard "Gay rights are human rights"
In 2011, Hillary Clinton made gay rights human rights in Geneva. A sentence with consequences.
On 6 December 2011, the Palais des Nations in Geneva became the stage for a sentence that went around the world. That evening, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped in front of a packed United Nations auditorium. The occasion was Human Rights Day, which fell four days later. The speech bore the innocuous title "Free and Equal in Dignity and Rights", borrowed from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her team had deliberately kept quiet about what it would actually be about. They feared that some ambassadors would otherwise not turn up at all.
Indeed, the audience included diplomats from states where same-sex love is prohibited. They heard a Secretary of State who left no room for doubt: "Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights." The phrase deliberately echoed her famous 1995 Beijing speech, in which she had declared women's rights to be human rights. Clinton also contradicted the claim that homosexuality was a Western invention. Gay and lesbian people exist in every country and every culture, she said.
The words had consequences. That same day, the White House published a memorandum from President Barack Obama. It obliged US agencies to work abroad against the criminalisation of LGBT people. Development aid was also to serve as leverage. For the first time, a US government explicitly made the rights of queer people part of its foreign policy.
Not everyone welcomed this. Conservative voices at home and abroad spoke of interference in cultural and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the Geneva speech is still regarded as a turning point. It brought the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people out of the diplomatic niche and put them where they belong: at the heart of universal human rights.