#LIG Demands Exclusion of Minors Under 14 Before the IACHR and the UN
The Movilh complaint states that the project as it stands, which will be voted on tomorrow in the Chamber of Deputies, violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
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By Agencia Presentes.
The Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (Movilh) is appealing to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to demand that Congress exclude children under 14 years of age from the Gender Identity Bill: “Adopt all possible measures within the framework of your powers to reverse the exclusion of children under 14 years of age from the bill approved by the Senate of Chile.”
The announcement was made hours before the final debate on the bill: it was approved by the Chilean Senate on Wednesday, September 5, and will be debated in the Chamber of Deputies this Wednesday, September 12. In a lengthy document addressed to the High Commissioner, former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, and the Secretary General of the IACHR, Paulo Abrao, Movilh detailed that the exclusion of children under 14 violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the requirements of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, as well as contradicting rulings by Chilean courts themselves, in a context where 35% of transgender people have attempted suicide before the age of 15.
CHILE Senate approved Gender Identity Bill: excludes children
Movilh recalled that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child was emphatic that “no child under 18 can be discriminated against on the basis of their gender identity,” and furthermore, that in 2015 it specifically asked Chile to cease this type of exclusion. Indeed, on October 30, 2015, the Committee expressed to Chile its “concern about the limitations on the exercise of the right to identity suffered by gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex children.” And that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held that all “considerations related to the right to gender identity (…) are applicable to children who wish to submit applications for recognition of their self-perceived gender identity in documents and records.”
READ ALSO Gender identity law in Chile: children included again
The Supreme Court also warns
Warnings aren't just coming from abroad: today, the Chilean Supreme Court also issued a favorable report on the bill and warned about "the Chilean state's debt to same-sex couples." This is because, as the law will be passed, it establishes the obligation to dissolve the marriages of transgender people who wish to change their name and gender marker on their birth certificates.
Chilean justice has its own jurisprudence: “The Chilean Judiciary has implemented measures to guarantee the rights of trans children, to the point that in its rulings it has allowed the rectification of the birth certificate of 5-year-olds, thus making the Bill that Recognizes and Protects the Gender Identity Law appear regressive and contrary not only to international standards, but also to the rulings of our own courts,” Movilh stated in its document.
In particular, the Supreme Court valued the provisions incorporated into the bill, such as the elimination of the requirement that both parents authorize the change of name and registered sex. And the possibility for minors to directly request judicial intervention if there is no agreement between the parents.
“The religious lobby is very strong in Chile.”
“The religious lobby is very strong in Chile.”In a dialogue with Presentes, the head of Human Rights and spokesperson for Movilh, Rolando Jiménez, explained: “We fought for more than 5 years for this law and one of the amendments we had achieved was that children be included because the suicide rate is three times higher in trans adolescents than in the rest of the population.”
“The lobbying against the law is very strong. Unfortunately, it combines the pathological conservatism of the Chilean political class, with an exacerbated fanaticism, the far right with a large parliamentary representation, and the evangelical caucus, which the right wing opened its doors to and which legislates with the Bible in hand,” Jiménez explained.
READ ALSO #Chile Tension in the public hearings for the Gender Identity Law
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