The GHJP has been involved for years in efforts to promote understandings of gender in international law responsive to the comprehensive and contextual range of experiences across genders, and intersectional structures of marginalization including across gender, race, place, (dis)ability, and poverty. This work aims both to ensure that all forms of gendered harm are made visible, and to empower coalitions and solidarity in human rights work to address these harms.
In 2016, GHJP co-director Alice M. Miller, alongside other human rights advocates and experts, penned an open letter on Why the U.N. Needs a Broad Concept of Gender to Ensure Universal Protection of Human Rights. Written in the context of discussions occurring at the Human Rights Council (HRC) addressing sexual orientation and gender identity and expression, the letter provides recommendations, as well as underlying rationale and implications, to promote universality and to ensure that no experience of gender-based human rights violations is neglected. The letter underscores that groups working at the intersections between gender and rights, including those concerned with intersex, trans*, gay, lesbian and women’s rights, have experience, knowledge, analytic frames and documentation of gendered human rights violations which all need to inform the HRC’s work on gender identity and expression.
In 2020 and 2021, GHJP co-director Alice M. Miller participated in workshops convened by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program exploring the concept of indirect discrimination (or practices with discriminatory impact) on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in a comparative and cross-disciplinary manner. Miller contributed a working paper examining how the ways that we identify, define and document harms to sexual rights through criminal law tend to open or close the possibilities for coalitions and joint advocacy work among related but not identically situated sexual and gender rights groups. In a second working paper (co-authored with Jessica Tueller) for the 2021 workshop focusing on the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Miller and Tueller center health and a health justice approach, and how it enables the identification of law-associated discriminations as both a cause and a consequence of ill-health, and reveals potential and pitfalls for justice work because of the ways health encompasses so many distinct processes at the individual body, intra- and inter-personal, and institutional level.