To allege that something is a matter of human rights is to tap into a powerful, affective narrative that indexes people’s responsibilities to each other. What actually violates human rights law, or the treaties upon which the international human rights legal system is built, however, is often much more constrained. The scholarship on the vernacularization of human rights–or the reframing of human rights into legible, meaningful frames–has focused on this relationship between how human rights are talked about (human rights discourse) and the actual enumerated rights in international human rights law (human rights law). Though the vernacularization process happens both in the translation of local disputes into violations of human rights law and from the more theoretical legal concepts to on-the-ground issues, much of the vernacularization literature has analyzed the latter. What is often missing from this analysis, however, is how these human rights translators must contend with the ideas that people on the ground already possess about human rights.

In 2017 and 2018, many Hongkongers understood human rights to be central to their identity, in part because they viewed human rights as an important distinction between them and the mainland Chinese. For my interlocutors–LGBT activists in Hong Kong–an important aspect to their work was contending with this ideology of human rights in their vernacularization of LGBT human rights, something the more working-class, Cantonese-dominant, “local” activists were able to better navigate than the middle-class and wealthy, English-dominant activists. In the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, a protest movement born from many Hongkongers’ desire to vote for their special administrative region government without input from the Chinese Communist Party, many Hongkongers actively took up the struggle to “defend” the territory of Hong Kong and each other from the threat of becoming “just another Chinese city.” Central to that defense was an identification with human rights as a clear demarcation between Hong Kong and mainland China.

This on-the-ground understanding of human rights complicated the vernacularization process, especially when non-local activists sought to translate LGBT human rights concepts from English to Cantonese. Many non-activist Hongkongers saw these competing discourses of human rights–human rights as a way to distinguish Hongkongers from the mainland Chinese and human rights as a tool to protect LGBT people–as an attempt by non-local activists to import “foreign” legal regimes to address gender and sexual issues in Hong Kong. This created a paradox in which “human rights” became both critical to Hong Kong identity and a potential foreign threat that sought to undermine distinctly Hong Kong modes of gender and sexuality.

Local activists, however, were able to avoid this paradox by vernacularizing LGBT human rights not into the language of human rights, but into the language of “humanity.” Local activists sought to reframe LGBT Hongkongers as possessing the same kind of humanity as members of the broader Hong Kong community and, as such, deserving of respect and equal treatment. Local activists’ vernacularization depended on their understanding that “human rights” already meant something to Hongkongers and could not be redefined for use in their fight for LGBT equality, prompting the need for new vocabularies to make LGBT human rights legible to people on the ground.

Read “Finding the “Humanity” in Human Rights: LGBT Activists and the Vernacularization of Human Rights in Hong Kong” in Law & Social Inquiry.

Nathan H. Madson (he/him/his) is a human rights advocate, educator, and interdisciplinary scholar. He currently works as a staff attorney on the International Justice Project at The Advocates for Human Rights in Minneapolis. His research addresses the work of LGBTQ+ activists in Hong Kong and their engagement with human rights discourses and law. He is particularly interested in the ways in which activists navigate and redefine the local and the transnational.