Research Seminar in Human Rights Studies. Also presenting at the seminar are two Master Students in Human Rights: Nina Pieter & Alexander Smith

In September 2015, 12 different UN agencies including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), High Commissioner for Refugees, UN Women, UNICEF, the ILO and the WHO issued a joint statement professing their unequivocal support for sexual orientation and gender identity. The statement illustrates tangibly how LGBTI+ rights had solidified their status as an uncontested human rights issue at the core of international collaboration and diplomacy. The path to this point had been long, and required decades of orchestrated lobbying by a broad coalition of activists. This chapters follows the early phases of lobbying by outlining how activists ‘prepared the ground’ for the recognition of LGBTI+ rights as integral human rights issues in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Subsequently activists paved the way for LGBTI+ rights’ mainstreaming within human rights legislation and policy making both at the national and international levels in the new Millennium.