Human Rights Day 2013

In leading up to Human Rights Day on December 10^th, recent news seems to mask any progress: UN-authorized French troops intervene in CAR in response to the latter’s spiraling bloodshed; the revelation that the NSA collects 5 billions phone records daily from Americans and non-Americans alike; and the Libyan parliament passed legislation recognizing Islamic law as the centerpiece of its country’s laws and institutions. Not exactly leaps forward in protecting the rights to life, privacy and personal liberty, respectively.

Because we don’t regularly hear about human rights triumphs or human rights defenders of celebrity-like status, most of us miss a crucial progression: human rights situations across the globe have improved—in some cases dramatically so—over the past several decades, and those suffering human rights abuses, and their advocates, have never been louder or better organized.

LGBTQ Rights Worldwide: A Love Story

The Global Atlas of late has been consumed by the tragedy in Boston that affected all of our contributors directly. Yet while many bad things were happening in the world, there have been distinctly positive developments on the world stage. In one realm of human rights where many feared there would never be progress, especially in more conservative religious societies, major gains were made just in the last week: France and New Zealand each legalized gay marriage nationwide, bringing the total number of countries with legalized same-sex marriage to fourteen. Fourteen out of nearly 200 countries isn’t great, but consider this: it is a 1,300 percent increase in just the last ten years. At the beginning of this century, not a single country had legalized equal marriage rights. Not a single US state had legal same-sex marriage. Not. One. Now nine have fully recognized equal marriage as well as the District of Columbia. So 2013, with 14 countries and 9 US states having legalized equal marriage rights, marks a sea-change from the world in which we were living not even 15 years ago.

Protests in favor of equal marriage rights in January in Paris. Courtesy of AFP/Thomas Samson