HUMAN RIGHTS, PRIVACY, AND DIGNITY: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LAWS CONTROLLING LGBTQ RIGHTS IN CONTEMPORARY DEMOCRACIES
Keywords:
LGBTQ rights; human dignity; privacy; constitutional law; comparative democracies; ICCPR; Yogyakarta Principles; surveillance; data protection..Abstract
Modern democracies often identify themselves as rights-respecting democracies, but LGBTQ citizens continue to face
legal restrictions that define intimacy, identity, speech, family-making, and general safety. In this paper, the author
examines the way in which law protects and limits LGBTQ rights in five so-called control pathways (i) criminal and
public-order regulations, (ii) family and personal-status law, (iii) administrative identity regimes, (iv) equality and
anti-discrimination, and (v) information governance, such as privacy, data protection, and state surveillance. The main
argument is that privacy and dignity are hinge rights. In weak privacy, democracies may tolerate indirect coercion:
forced disclosure, outing threats, data-driven targeting, and bureaucratic humiliation, all of which even in the absence
of overt criminalisation undermine dignity. Through the doctrinal and comparative approach that is reinforced by the
international human rights norms, the paper relates Article 17 of the ICCPR (privacy) to the dignity-based
constitutional reasoning in historic developments, such as the post-colonial decriminalisation process exemplified by
the Indian Section 377 jurisprudence. The paper hypothesizes the Legal Control-Privacy-Dignity (LCPD) model,
which describes that legal controls are converted into dignity harms in the form of information exposure, stigma, and
unequal access to institutions. The research adds a feasible mapping model to lawmakers and courts, and provides
policy suggestions based on proportionality, implementing anti-discrimination, and privacy-by-design in
governmental administration and online governance.