Civil Society, Economy & Trade, Headlines, Human Rights, Labour, Latin America & the Caribbean

CHILE: Anti-Discrimination Bill Undermined by the Right

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Jan 30 2008 (IPS) - The Chilean Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (MOVILH), together with members of Congress belonging to the centre-left governing coalition parties, have complained that conservative groups are attempting to water down an anti-discrimination bill.

The bill was sent to Congress on Mar. 22, 2005 by the government of then President Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006), and at present is being debated in the Senate, the second stage of the approval process.

An article of the original text states that arbitrary discrimination shall be understood to mean any distinction, exclusion or restriction on the basis of race or ethnicity, colour, national origin, socioeconomic status, geographical area, place of residence, religion, belief, or language.

It also includes discrimination for ideological or political views, union membership or participation in trade associations, sex, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, age, parentage, personal appearance, genetic constitution, or any other social condition.

“The right is waging a tremendous campaign against the bill, with the aim of removing the clause about sexual orientation from the text,” Rolando Jiménez, the head of MOVILH, told IPS at a recent press conference.

Jiménez was accompanied by Socialist Party (PS) Senator Carlos Ominami, Party For Democracy (PPD) Senator Guido Girardi, and Christian Democrat lawmaker Gabriel Silber, all from the governing Coalition for Democracy.

The opposition rightwing Alliance for Chile is made up of the National Renewal (RN) and Independent Democratic Union (UDI) parties.

“(Some UDI lawmakers) have behaved deceitfully and treacherously, as whenever we have contacted them they have said they agree with non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, while they continue to introduce amendments to remove the sexual orientation clause from the bill,” Jiménez said.

He said that one of the amendments proposed by the opposition legislators is to replace the article defining specific kinds of discrimination with a “generic declaration” that would omit the detailed characterisation and delete the explicit mention of sexual orientation. In his view, this would render the draft law less effective.

“Furthermore, they have applied pressure and sown a perverse campaign of terror among the Evangelical churches” to persuade them to oppose the bill, he said.

Jiménez also said that “the Catholic Church has sent documents to the government, expressing its concern about the draft law and asking for (various different) churches to be exempt,” due to their beliefs which condemn homosexuality.

When consulted by IPS, the Chilean Bishops Conference’s communications department declined to comment.

“We have been very flexible. For instance, we agreed to eliminating the provision for special judicial action against discrimination, and negotiated instead with the conservatives to reform current protective instruments” for punishing discrimination, Jiménez said.

Se negoció con la derecha reformar los recursos de protección e incorporar ahí elementos” para perseguir la discriminación, recordó.

“But these changes they want to introduce are unacceptable to us. If they succeed, we will protest the draft law and take our fight to international human rights organisations,” he said.

On Jan. 29, Jiménez was due to meet with the president’s chief of staff, José Antonio Viera-Gallo, who is in charge of relations with the legislative branch, “to demand that the government work for a proper anti-discrimination law.”

However, he is concerned by the “negative precedents” already established by Viera-Gallo, who negotiated with conservatives to modify other key draft laws, such as the one creating the Institute of Human Rights, and the one ratifying International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169, on indigenous peoples.

This earned Viera-Gallo criticism from human rights and indigenous organisations.

The press conference was also attended by teacher Sandra Pavez, and former assistant chief of investigative police César Contreras, who said that if an anti-discrimination law had existed before, they would not have been dismissed from their jobs because of their sexual orientation.

After working for 21 years as a religious education teacher, Pavez “came out” as a lesbian, and the Catholic Church refused to renew the certificate she is required to have in order to teach her subject.

“My undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in religious studies are worthless without the certificate,” which is issued by the Church, she told IPS. Although she was not fired from the public school where she works, and where the head teachers, teachers and school trustees support her, she has been relegated to administrative duties.

Contreras, in turn, was discharged from the investigative police in 2006 after 18 years of active service, with only two years to go to his retirement.

His superiors accused him of belonging to a paedophile ring after finding links on his computer to web pages with homosexual content. But the justice system threw out these charges brought against him by the police.

Contreras has been out of work for two years, during which time he has made several judicial and administrative appeals, so far without success. At the moment he is waiting for the executive branch to respond to his request to be reinstated into the service.

“There was no administrative prosecution against me, and they did not wait for the court’s decision on the crime I was alleged to have committed. I was discharged in an illegal and unconstitutional manner, because of the vacuum in the constitution itself, and in the laws, which allows institutions and anyone else who so wishes to discriminate,” he told IPS.

“We are supporting MOVILH, because if this bill is approved, even with the amendments and cuts that the opposition are proposing, we’ll still be better off than we are now. At present there is no law to protect people who have suffered discrimination,” he concluded.