ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a comparative approach and analyses the relatively recent choice of the European Union and the United States to make the human rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Intersexual (LGBTI) individuals a foreign policy priority. At face value, this choice can be interpreted in line with strengthening of a rights-based approach and govern development assistance through impartial human rights rules and standards. Yet, such an approach might also run into a number of difficulties when introduced to a complex, real-world context. In the chapter, I emphasise that the practice of rights-based development policies is closely bound to the process of context-specific application. Through an examination of the process through which the EU and the US decided on their approach to an anti-LGBTI bill introduced in Uganda in 2014, I show that human rights conditionality is not applied in an automated fashion in accordance with impartial rules and standards. Rather, US and EU executives weighed colliding normative concerns connected to the benefits of signalling disagreement with Ugandan authorities and how such signalling could cause unwanted consequences for Ugandan citizens on the ground.
