Sex Rights : The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002

Discrimination due to gender and sexual orientation tends nowadays to be prohibited under international human rights instruments, as well as under the national laws of many countries that express their commitment to defending human rights. Nonetheless, as the work of Amnesty International has shown, violence against women (whatever their sexual orientation), gay men, trans-gendered and transsexual persons remains an appallingly constant phenomenon, both in countries that have an official commitment to fighting these forms of discrimination and in those that do not.

These essays seek to explore some of the inter-connections between human rights, gender, and sexuality. The contributors are united in their belief that it is a serious human rights violation unjustly to penalize people because of their sex or sexual orientation. Many difficult questions are considered. How do we understand and categorize human rights abuses related to a person's sex or sexual orientation, for example? Does their inclusion within the remit of human rights abuses require us to refine what we mean by human rights? What weight, if any, should be given to demands made in the name of particular religious and cultural traditions which seek to restrict the rights of women and sexual minority groups? And how far have we come, and how far have we left to go, in the quest for a world in which discrimination based on sex and sexual orientation is a thing of the past?

Nicholas Bamforth is a University Lecturer in Law at Oxford University and a Fellow of The Queen's College. He is the author of Sexuality, Morals and Justice (1997) and editor of Public Law in a Multi-layered Constitution (2003).