Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-2025
ISSN
0006-8047
Publisher
Boston University School of Law
Language
en-US
Abstract
In the last decade, a distinct sociolegal phenomenon has been sweeping across the Global South—the judicial decriminalization of same-sex sexual conduct. On the other hand, progress on LGBTQ rights has occurred in parallel to transnational countermobilization and backlash against LGBTQ rights. Yet, neither the phenomenon of judicial decriminalization nor the countermobilization and backlash to decriminalization has attracted the attention that these phenomena deserve from doctrinal legal scholars, comparative and international law scholars, or legal mobilization scholars.
In this paper, I help to remedy this oversight by making three contributions to legal mobilization scholarship and to international law and relations scholarship. First, I demonstrate that at the heart of decriminalization legal mobilization in the Global South is a transnational advocacy network whose goal is to promote and to assist decriminalization of consensual same-sex sexual conduct through litigation—a transnational litigation network.
Second, I discuss two normative critiques of human rights advocacy applicable to transnational litigation networks. The first critique, “human rights imperialism,” posits that Global North states and actors situated therein seek to impose the human rights regime upon the states and populations of the Global South. Consequently, as I describe in the Article, state actors and religious officials are able to invoke an anti-colonial discourse when resisting decriminalization efforts. The second critique, “human rights elitism,” alleges that shifting political contestation to the courts risks marginalizing already marginalized groups that constitute the grassroots of most social movements. Legal mobilization prompted by transnational decriminalization litigation network actors in the Global North is vulnerable to both critiques. Yet, decriminalization is too important an issue to cede the ground entirely to the so-called “traditionalists” or to eschew litigation altogether.
In response to the critiques of human rights imperialism and human rights elitism, the third contribution I make in this paper is to prescribe a set of ethical lawyering approaches for transnational decriminalization litigation network actors to adopt—which I term transnational movement lawyering. Transnational decriminalization litigation network actors must use their financial and knowledge resources to support—rather than to direct, to overshadow, or to supplant—local actors and their goals and strategies. Ultimately, transnational movement lawyering might even mean not litigating in some cases.
This framework has broad implications. In the twenty-first century, human rights litigation is central to domestic and transnational politics. If activists are to spread human rights norms globally, they must take seriously the critiques of the human rights regime and of litigation as a social change strategy.
Recommended Citation
Ayodeji K. Perrin,
Decriminalization Matters: LGBTQ Transnational Litigation Networks and Movement Lawyering in the Global South
,
105
Boston University Law Review
67
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4072
Included in
Human Rights Law Commons, Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons, Legal Writing and Research Commons, Litigation Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons
