Activists and the Yogyakarta Principles

What are the Yogyakarta Principles?

The Unprincipled Sleight of Hand Intended to Fool Everyone

The Yogyakarta Principles (YPs), officially published in November 2006, emerged from a meeting of self-identified human rights experts in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Their stated purpose was to provide clarity on the application of international human rights law in relation to “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI), aiming to address human rights violations against individuals based on these grounds. In 2017, the YP Plus 10 document expanded these principles to include “gender expression” and “sex characteristics,” further broadening their scope.

Superficially, the YPs address a wide array of human rights, including non-discrimination, recognition before the law, privacy, freedom from torture, and economic, social, and cultural rights. They present themselves as a comprehensive framework intended to guide states in fulfilling their obligations. The document, signed by 29 individuals from 25 countries, purports to be an authoritative interpretation of existing international law.

However, a critical perspective reveals a stark contrast between this stated aim and the actual function of the YPs. They are not a treaty, nor were they adopted by any inter-governmental body or recognised international law-making process. Instead, they represent the views of a select group of advocates attempting to define international law through non-state processes. This immediately raises concerns about their legitimacy and democratic accountability.

From the outset, critics contend that the YPs conflate “sexual orientation” - an immutable characteristic related to same-sex attraction - with “gender identity,” a subjective and often fluid internal sense of self. This conflation is argued to be a deliberate strategic manoeuvre to embed a radical redefinition of sex and identity into legal frameworks under the guise of established human rights principles. The principles, therefore, are not merely an interpretation of existing law but an aspirational and prescriptive attempt to create new legal norms, fundamentally altering the understanding of sex from a biological reality to a subjective self-declaration. This serves as the bedrock for the covert activism inherent in their design.

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