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Fifty years ago homosexual acts were illegal in all the countries that trace their legal systems back to the British common law. Public authorities, media and social attitudes throughout the West treated homosexuality as illicit, often unmentionable. There was a tradition of seeing homosexuality as a foreign vice – the Greek vice or the French vice or an Oriental vice – not a local vice. In 2005, after forty years of reforms, criminal laws that target homosexual acts are gone in the West. Entry into the European Union is conditional on laws prohibiting discrimination in the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Marriage has been opened to same-sex couples in the Netherlands, Belgium, the state of Massachusetts, Canada and Spain. Same-sex marriage was a major issue in the 2004 American presidential election. 'Human rights' play an important role in modern states. Respect for 'human rights' is a marker if the legitimacy of regimes. The globalising agenda is clear in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's well-known description of human rights as the "common language of humanity". ; AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National University

Traces activities leading to the first accreditation of lesbian and gay organizations at a UN meeting, 1993, and of the first lesbian and gay organization to gain consultative status with the Economic and Social Council, 1993. Refers to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and of controversy surrounding inclusion in its membership of organizations supporting pedophilia.

AbstractLesbian and gay rights are argued as rights to privacy, rights to protection from violence, rights to equality as individuals, rights to equality as family units, rights of minorities or as part of a larger framework of the recognition of sexual diversity within the society. In the last decades Canadian law has recognized equality claims, first through the reform of antidiscrimination laws and later through the interpretation of the equality provisions in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.The major current issue, important because it involves lesbian and gay visibility, is the recognition of same-sex couples for the range of rights, obligations and benefits connected with marriage or heterosexual cohabitation. Recognition is occurring throughad hocreforms, often in response to litigation or to decisions of human rights tribunals.

Defines the concept vis-à-vis individual and group rights and presents a number of complicated conflicts between them exemplified by court litigation in various countries. Rights or obligations deriving from belonging to a linguistic, national, religious, or other collectivity wishing to preserve its distinctiveness and exercise some authority over its members.