Protesters at last year's Auckland Pride Parade. Photo by Todd Henry Photography
New Zealand has been singled out and told to improve the human rights of LGBTQI+ communities by three United Nations member states, reports Radio New Zealand.Overnight in Geneva Justice Minister Andrew Little reported the current state of human rights in Aotearoa to the Universal Periodic Review. During conference, UN member states make specific recommendations on human rights-related issues countries need to improve on.New Zealand has been reviewed twice before and until now had never received recommendations that relate to sexual orientation, sex characteristics or gender identity and expression. But this time, three countries – Chile, Australia and Iceland – pointed out issues regarding the rights of intersex and gender minority communities that needed to be addressed.Chile advised that Aotearoa end non-consensual surgeries on intersex people, particularly children. Iceland recommended New Zealand "add gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics as specifically prohibited grounds of discrimination in Article 21 of the Human Rights Act of 1993". Similarly, Australia advised that "New Zealand amend the Human Rights Act of 1993 to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and intersex status".As it stands, the Human Rights Act only prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex but does not give any explicit protection to people who are discriminated against because of their gender identity. In response to these recommendations, Little declared that his government was already planning to include gender identity as grounds for discrimination.Little said in his opening remarks that New Zealand had “unacceptably high levels” of domestic violence, particularly against minority women. "One in three women in New Zealand experience physical, emotional or sexual violence from a partner in their lifetime… Māori women, queer women, trans women, women living with a disability and young women experience more violence and are more likely to be victimised by current systems," he said.He said the law around prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity needed to be “very clear to all New Zealanders”.
Advertisement