South Africa has not even indicated whether it will support the resolution brought by Chile, Uruguay, Colombia and Brazil. Supporting a resolution that builds on the foundation that South Africa itself laid in 2011 should be a no-brainer, yet its position remains inscrutable. So far 40 states have agreed to co-sponsor and South Africa is not among them.
Making sense of South Africa’s foreign policy in relation to the human rights of LGBT people presents an enigma. It is hard to find consistency and coherence, or any sense of overarching policy. For three years South Africa has inexplicably stalled on tabling a follow-up resolution in Geneva. And at the 2013 United Nations General Assembly in New York, South Africa abruptly stopped attending meetings of the core group of LGBT-friendly states, and declined to attend a high-level ministerial side event affirming the rights of LGBT people.
In South Africa, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender (LGBT) people have the same rights as non-LGBT people. South Africa has a complicated and varied past when it comes to LGBT people's civil rights. Traditional South African mores have affected the legal and social status of between 400,000 and over 2 million lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, and intersex South Africans.
