This Guide seeks to provide insight and resources to actors interested in the development of rights claims around sexuality and sexual health. After engaging with the vexed question of the scope of sexual rights, it explores the rules and principles governing the way in which human rights claims are developed and applied to sexuality and sexual health, and how that development is linked to law and made a matter of state obligation. This understanding is critical to policy and programming in sexual health and rights, as it supports calling on the relevant range of human rights, such as privacy, non-discrimination, health or other universally accepted human rights, as well as demanding the action of states under their international and national law obligations to support sexual health.
Political consensus on the term “sexual rights”, although fiercely debated over the past decades, has never been reached.1 Resistance stems from countries’ claims to radically different understandings (and fears) of what “sexual rights” includes and therefore might bind them to. This Guide has been developed to help untangle confusions, to make clear how and why sexual rights are human rights, to support political advances in the recognition of sexual rights, and especially to clarify their legal foundations. The parameters of sexual rights are defined as the full range of existing human rights that have been applied to public and private aspects of sexuality and sexual health. The Guide emphasizes that the scope of “sexual rights” is linked to, though distinct from, reproductive rights, that sexuality and its diverse forms and meanings, including its link to reproduction, require specific attention, and it shows how human rights law can be and has been used to underpin good practice for the promotion of sexual health. Most critically, the Guide focuses on and explains how these developments are supported by well-accepted rules of application and interpretation in rights law
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