On the 4 April, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution entitled ‘Combatting discrimination, violence and harmful practices against intersex persons.’ Governments from Chile, South Africa, Australia and Finland proposed the resolution, and 24 countries voted in favour of the resolution, with none against it and 23 abstaining from voting. The resolution encourages Member States to improve their efforts to address discrimination, practices that are harmful and violence against intersex persons. It also requests that the root causes of this discrimination be addressed. The resolution further requires the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to prepare a report on human rights violations recorded against intersex persons, covering laws and policies that are discriminatory, reports of violence, and other practices that are harmful, while also addressing root causes and best practices. A presentation of the report is to occur at the Council’s 60th session, potentially pencilled in the calendar for 2025.
People that are born with naturally occurring variations in their sex traits, which do not fit the common definition of male or female can be defined as intersex. Findings of the UN indicate that approximately 1.7% of the world population is born with intersex characteristics. This resolution addresses the practice of exposing children that are born with intersex traits to “normalising” surgeries, which involves an irreversible procedure to alter their sex characteristics. The Council also recognised that intersex people are often exposed to discrimination in many areas of their lives, such as health, education and social security.
Different bodies of the UN have addressed their concerns over the violations of intersex persons’ human rights in the past, including different UN human rights treaty bodies opposing and condemning early sterilising surgeries at least 50 times in the last 13 years, and issuing recommendations to prohibit these forced or coerced medical surgeries. Further to this, shortly before this resolution, towards the end of 2023, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a technical note on the rights of intersex people which proposed the ban of “forced or coerced medical interventions with respect to intersex characteristics, such as non-emergency medical interventions performed without full, free and informed consent.”
Commenting on the resolution passed, Dr Morgan Carpenter, Executive Director of Intersex Human Rights Australia (IHRA) and a bioethicist at the University of Sydney, School of Public Health, said “This is a great moment for the intersex community, but we still have a long way to go.”
Click here to read the UN Human Rights Council’s Resolution, Combatting discrimination, violence and harmful practices against intersex persons. Click here to read the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights technical note.