The Afterlives of Global LGBT Human Rights in Haiti

I begin by elaborating the geopolitical context that facilitated the emergence of projects in the Global South to document homophobia and transphobia, focusing on one by New York-based organization Housing Works, Inc. Following the US federal government's declaration that "gay rights are human rights," the US State Department created the Global Equality Fund, which supported the creation of LGBT rights documentation projects by Silicon Valley-based nonprofit tech company Benetech as well as "capacity-building" work in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Malawi. Housing Works CEO Charles King had connections with the founder of Benetech and knew about this work, so he garnered grant money from a private US foundation to initiate documentation projects in Haiti using Benetech's Martus software, developed to document human rights abuses. Haiti was therefore one of several places with predominantly Black populations in the Global South where US organizations initiated documentation projects with local "partners." As in the case highlighted in this article, these projects often worked through already established relationships between US Americans who directed the funds. My analysis here focuses on the political economy of these projects as "accumulation by documentation" (to play on David Harvey's "accumulation by dispossession") that financially benefits US American people and organizations. This accumulation relies on the exploitation of Haitian labor in documenting homophobia and transphobia (as with other kinds of documentation required by NGO accountability regimes). It also requires the valuing of data in what Sally Engels Merry calls "the seductions of quantification" in human rights and specifically the value of data about homophobia and transphobia in predominantly Black contexts in the Global South. However, the ultimate failure of this human rights documentation project illuminates that capital still flowed from one US foundation or organization to another regardless of the creation of any actual data. Although I offer these insights based on particular organizations, individuals, and projects, my real concern is about the colonialist/imperialist structures that get (re)produced in human rights work

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