SEXUAL HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS A legal and ... - The ICHRP

on health. These include laws on discrimination (Chapter 1), access to information (Chapter
7), control of expression (Chapter 7), and state responses to violence, whether perpetrated by
the state or requiring state response to violence perpetrated by others (Chapter 5). Moreover,
this publication highlights several topics where the issues of sexuality and gender are
explicitly conjoined in the law, such as the regulation of sexual activity through the criminal
law (Chapter 2), and including the specific focus on exchange of sex for money (Chapter 8)
or the regulation of gender expression and identity (Chapter 4). Specific chapeaus further
elaborate why these issues are important focal points for policy makers wishing to understand
how to use law to promote sexual health.
A rights-based analysis of laws related to each of these eight topics asks questions about the
relationship between a law’s focus and scope, as well as its historical development, to analyze
the law’s actual or potential implications for the health and rights of a wide range of people.
At all times, the concern focuses on the laws’ impacts on the health of all people - with a
special concern for children and adolescents. The analyses explore the relationship between
specific laws and the workings of social processes (such as inclusion and exclusion, stigma,
and barriers created by threats of violence for each topic).
State responsibility is a key aspect of law that is made visible in these analyses. These reports
identify laws through which states themselves promote or violate. Laws that expressly
provide gender-neutral protection from sexual assault, for example, promote the sexual health
of all by recognizing that women, men and children need protection from sexual violence,
and break free of historical stereotypes that connect the harm of rape to woman only. They
also reinforce the state’s obligation to respect rights, and to protect against the abuse by
others. In contrast, laws criminalizing consensual sexual activity between adults, for example,
both violate internationally accepted rights of privacy and also drive underground persons
afraid to seek get information that will protect their health. Law itself may also authorize
penalties which under human rights analysis would be deemed arbitrary or excessive acts of
violence, such as capital punishment, flogging or amputation or arbitrary imprisonment for
non-violent sexual activity (so called morals offenses).
States are also responsible for ensuring that they use due diligence to protect against harms
by others 2. Laws that fail to provide an effective response to coercive sex or marital rape by
husbands diminish women’s rights to bodily integrity and decision-making, as well as their
control over the conditions of safer and desired sexual activity within marriage. The state’s
failure to secure rights leads to bad health outcomes, as coerced sex is often unprotected, with
negative results (unwanted pregnancy, HIV, feelings of anger, insecurity, mental health
deficits as well as un-remedied physical injuries) for the woman.
A key way in which law can support sexual health is by guaranteeing broad access to
effective health care. Analyzing how health care can support (or impede) sexual health for all
persons requires, therefore, an examination of the general structure of health services relevant
to sexual health (how are they provided, financed and dispensed, with regard availability to
all?).
In addition, the analysis of health service laws must also consider the barriers that specific
populations and marginalized sub-groups may face: does the law on its face or in practice
exclude unmarried women, from accessing contraception, for example? Does the law
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