In her speech at the XXIV ILGA World Conference in Vienna in November 2008, Gloria Careaga testified on the lesbians constant involvement in the United Nations events, both within and outside ILGA.

THE LESBIAN MOVEMENTS WITHIN THE HUMAN RIGHTS PERSPECTIVE

Gloria Careaga

“(…) The work developed from ILGA within the United Nations has been a long process.

(…) International conferences are one of the spaces where we have been participating for a long time. The 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights and the Conference on AIDS; the Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994; the World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995; and the ­Conference Against Racism and Discrimination in Durban, 2001. In all these conferences there was a constant presence of lesbians and gays; and ILGA has been feeding itself from these processes, forming its own views. During all this time throughout the 90s and this new century, there have been people invariably accepting the responsibility to present themselves as lesbians, initially during the Vienna Conference on AIDS and in the World Conference on Women. They have asserted their presence and faced governments with declarations on the invisibility ­imposed on lesbians and gays.

Rebeca Sevilla, Peruvian, who was our ILGA Secretary General, participated as a lesbian in the Court of Human Rights at Vienna, in 1993. Her participation in that Court, together with other lesbians, generated a very important climate; and it helped to achieve at the Vienna conference the recognition of women's rights which were not considered by the United Nations. That first-time presence of a lesbian speaking publicly from her experience, telling about the main obstacles which we were encountering, was very moving (…)

Patria Jiménez, Mexico, spoke for the first time in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), another very important space. And the interesting thing is that two lesbians appearing publicly as such in these spaces are Latin American, which breaks totally with the image that being lesbian or gay is something from the North, something which can be related only to European or North American countries. I believe that they played a very important role; they were ­pioneers in stimulating these new views on the ­condition of lesbians and gays, and each time we are more and more women and men present in these spaces.

Something else I consider significant to emphasize is that it was during the Conference on Women in 1995 where we finally brought a strong debate about sexual orientation. At the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population there was already an important attempt to include sexual orientation and sexual rights, but the opposition was so strong that nothing on these issues could be introduced. Despite this opposition, the acknowledgment of young people's sexuality – ­including outside of marriage - was achieved, something that seemed impossible even to contemplate. This acknowledgment and the introduction of the word 'gender' in the international policies were very important achievements; even though they were ­negotiated and traded off against 'sexual orientation and sexual rights', they opened a very important door for the debate at the Conference on Women.
In the Conference on Women a general feminist ­alliance was formed among all the lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual women in order to push in a very significant way sexual rights and sexual orientation, those two elements that were left pending in Cairo in 1994 and which were taken as main flags to Beijing in 1995.

I was very impressed to hear how the delegates of my country, Mexico, at the end of the 1995 Conference mentioned that they had never learned so much on sexual rights and sexual orientation as they had at the Conference on Women (…). What I want to highlight is the intensity that these debates acquired at this Conference and that our presence in this space was really very important. (…)”
 

From ILGA’s publication “Lesbian Movements: Ruptures & Alliances”
http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/lYwN1bs14T