At the UN, plans for a global coalition to attack LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights

Far-right activists are trying to dismantle global protections for LGBTQ+ people under the guise of ‘family values’

Originally published on Global Voices

US President Trump speaking at the U.N. General Assembly. Photo by The White House . Fair use .

This article by Hope Pisoni was originally published by Uncloseted Media , an LGBTQ+ focused investigative news outlet, on October 1, 2026. An edited version is being republished on Global Voices as part of a content partnership agreement. It has been edited for length and style.

On September 17, while the United Nations (U.N.) was hosting its annual General Assembly for diplomats and leaders from all over the world, several key figures filled a room across the street at the Millennium Hilton in Midtown Manhattan. Attendees included Trump administration officials, leaders of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups , far-right politicians from Latin America and reporters from far-right media.

These people were meeting for the Global Forum for Life, Family and Freedoms, a two-day summit of right-wing leaders with an ambitious goal to create a new “pro-life and pro-family” Core Group at the U.N.

Since 2008, the U.N. has had an LGBTI Core Group with 42 member states whose mission is to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights on a global stage. But the organizers of this new group hope to create an opposing organization to push for policies that undermine reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights around the globe.

Aarón Lara, the Mexico-based conservative activist who came up with the idea for the group, said in an August article that the existing LGBTI Core Group has only been successful because there has not been organized conservative opposition, which a new core group would provide.

Lara (left) speaking with a reporter in the Dominican Republic in March. Screenshot via Central Noticias YouTube.

“[The LGBTI Core Group] has successfully established victimhood narratives and incorporated observances with global impact. … I always use this example: If it were a soccer match and one team failed to show up, the winner by default would be the team that was present,” Lara said.

Lara and other supporters of the group agreed at the forum to draw up plans for its creation in the coming months. They may be encouraged to move quickly because the group’s leaders have said they want to use the U.S.’s global influence and capitalize on the current administration’s anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stance to do it. The U.S. recently left the LGBTI Core Group, an early move by Trump in his second term.

What is a Core Group?

The LGBTI Core Group describes itself as “an informal cross-regional group of United Nations Member States.” While it is not an official U.N. body, its work includes ensuring that LGBTQ+ people are considered and protected across all of the U.N.’s activities, from humanitarian aid to human rights resolutions.

For example, one of the first U.N. resolutions to reference LGBTQ+ people was one protecting civilians against extrajudicial executions. When some members tried to remove LGBTQ people from those protections, advocates and allies fought to keep them in place. Maria Sjödin, executive director of Outright International, an NGO that focuses on supporting LGBTQ rights worldwide, told Uncloseted Media that work like this could be in jeopardy should the new core group come to fruition.

“We’re talking about the protection of some very basic human rights, and that the opposition to that is trying to organize to make it even more difficult to pass such a thing is really quite horrible,” she says.

Core groups are not official U.N. bodies, so there is no strictly required procedure for their creation. While there have been other core groups established at the U.N., the LGBTI group is unique in that it is designed for continuous operation on multiple issues rather than as a response to a specific conflict or crisis. The “pro-life, pro-family” core group would change that, threatening to shift the balance of power at the U.N.

Ipas , an international NGO that seeks to increase access to safe abortions and contraception, shared a briefing paper, “The Pro-Life and Pro-Family Core Group: The Evangelical Architecture Supporting Anti-Gender Initiatives at the United Nations,” with Uncloseted Media. It explains that this core group would allow anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion governments to collaborate on “coordinated voting” to “dilute, block, or impose conditions on language regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights.” The briefing also predicts that the core group would accelerate existing efforts to portray anti-LGBTQ+ politics as “sovereign resistance” against “globalism” in the public eye.

“This discourse … asserts national sovereignty over agreed-upon international human rights, reframing sexual and reproductive rights as an external imposition rather than as already recognized human rights standards,” the briefing reads.

How did we get here?

The first CIVF, held in Mexico City in 2017. Image from CIVF via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Lara is the founder and president of the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family (CIVF). Founded in Mexico City in 2017, CIVF describes itself as “ Un movimiento de reforma moral, educativa, social y jurídica por la vida y la familia” ( a movement for moral, educational, social, and legal reform for life and family) and is best known for holding an annual congress for leaders, primarily from Latin America and Spain, to discuss the promotion of socially conservative policies.

In a 2021 article in an evangelical publication, Lara said that his group had applied to become a core group at the U.N.

“We have the conviction that it is our responsibility as believers to be a light in the midst of darkness, this is why [we] are making this big effort,” he said.

The third CIVF, held in Panama in 2019. Image from CIVF via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0 .

While that application never came to fruition, Lara remained interested in starting a U.N. core group, and announced in July 2026 that CIVF — which did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment — was launching a new plan to do so.

How did the US get involved?

The following month, Lara shared more details of the plan with The Washington Stand, a news outlet owned by Family Research Council , a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group closely affiliated with Focus on the Family . In the article, Lara says the goal is for the U.S. to sponsor the new group because of its powerful position on the world stage.

Sjödin is concerned about U.S. involvement in a group like this. “[It] already has an outsized influence on the world, so the U.S. potentially taking on a leadership role in a coalition like this also risks the effects being outsized and makes this an initiative that is going to be more difficult to challenge,” she says.

Valerie Huber speaking at CPAC Hungary in 2022. Image by Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons . CC BY-SA 4.0 .

To that end, CIVF enlisted Valerie Huber, an influential American ally based in Washington, D.C., in their fight. Huber, who co-led the September 17th forum alongside Lara, is an American right-wing activist who held multiple leadership roles at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during Trump’s first term. She has consistently promoted the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people in her work — the organization she led before getting her HHS appointment released a guideline that said “it would be inappropriate and unethical to assert or affirm” trans kids’ genders.

“Valerie Huber is internationally recognized in the anti-rights space,” Wendy Via, co-founder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism , told Uncloseted Media. “She is bringing some credibility [and] influence to the idea of creating a separate core group, so she’s gonna be able to get people to join with her.”

During her tenure at HHS, Huber helped craft the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family (GCD), an agreement between 46 countries, including the U.S. under both Trump administrations, affirming a commitment to hardline opposition to abortion and promoting the heteronormative nuclear family “as foundational to society.”

Critics have noted that many of the agreement’s signatories are led by notoriously authoritarian governments with harsh restrictions on LGBTQ+ people. For example, Saudi Arabia’s maximum penalty for gay sex is death , and Russia classifies the “international LGBT movement” as an extremist group.

During his first week in office, former president Joe Biden withdrew the U.S. from the GCD just months after its launch, stating , “It is the policy of my Administration to support women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States, as well as globally.”

But Huber, now out of her government job and leading the anti-abortion NGO Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), continued to champion the agreement. She’s traveled around the world meeting heads of state, including in Burundi and Argentina , who would quickly go on to join the GCD, while developing more concrete plans to carry out its goals. IWH did not respond to a request for comment.

Within the first week of Trump’s second term, the U.S. rejoined the agreement, and in June, the U.S. assumed the leading secretariat position among its signatories. Via says pushing the core group initiative while the U.S. is the secretariat is likely strategic timing.

“The U.N. is seen as the boogeyman for far-right and Christian Nationalist groups, because their definition of human rights is expansive and inclusive, which is not what these organizations want,” Via says. “But they’re gonna work within the system because it looks like they have an opportunity.”

Huber has advocated in favor of the core group since August and has said that the GCD is “the substantive basis” for the work ahead.

“What has not yet been built is the intentional, sustained coordination that turns a shared commitment into shared strategy at the international negotiating table,” she told The Washington Stand. “A nation that arrives at a negotiation alone is outmatched. A nation that arrives having strategized with 40 others is not.”

The who’s who of the far right are on board

Faith leaders praying over Donald Trump in March 2025. Image via The White House . Fair use .

The September 17th forum was held in the hopes of creating a roadmap to execute the plans for the core group. The event was sponsored by Well Versed, an evangelical NGO whose mission is to bring “biblical principles of governance to government leaders and the people who elect them.”

The forum attracted a number of noteworthy guests. There were three representatives from the Trump administration, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, Director of HHS Global Affairs Bethany Kozma, and Ellie Cohanim, the senior policy advisor at the U.S. mission to the U.N.

Leaders from several U.S.-based right-wing organizations also made appearances , including Turning Point USA Faith , C-Fam — which holds special consultative status at the U.N. — and Salt and Light Council , a group focused on getting churches involved in right-wing politics.

Via called these groups “the usual suspects” when it comes to work like this, but noted that their power has grown in recent years.

In addition to the power players from the U.S., there was a stacked lineup of folks from the global right. Lawmakers from Peru, Uruguay, and Guatemala, all countries where CIVF has been active, were present. Also in attendance was Artur Pawlowski, a Canadian far-right pastor known for his role in the Alberta Separatist movement; Armenian evangelical activist and former politician Stepan Sargsyan; and Dutch lobbyist Henk Jan van Schothorst.

What this lineup indicates, Via says, is that the Christian far-right is interested in wielding its outsized influence in the Trump administration to impact the global stage.

“It is the traction that the Christian nationalists have gained since Trump has been in office,” she says. “Because of the administration’s willingness to wield power and influence in other countries based on this Biblical worldview … you have had some political leaders be more accepting of the idea.”

What could this mean?

In her interview for The Washington Stand, Huber said that the point of the core group is to organize concrete action towards the goals of the GCD, which on its own is a non-binding agreement with no mechanism to enforce or ensure compliance among its signatories.

One way the core group should achieve that, Huber says, is through Protego, a project launched in 2023 by IWH that creates a road map for countries to follow in their policymaking on issues of women’s health. Outlined in their Women’s Optimal Health Framework , IWH advocates against abortion and promotes sex education that prioritizes abstinence and “prepar[ing] for a healthy marriage and future family.”

While the 62-page guide makes no explicit mention of LGBTQ people, Sjödin says that this kind of sex education, which has been widely criticized as ineffective , “is focused on promoting heterosexuality as the only form of acceptable sexuality.”

“It is used to push these binary norms that are harmful for anyone who doesn’t live up to it or doesn’t agree with it, and it limits access to education for young people who need to know both about themselves, especially if they don’t think of themselves as heterosexual, but also about everyone else so that they have an understanding that humans are different.”

Giammattei speaking at an IWH conference in 2021. Screenshot via the Government of Guatemala YouTube .

A few countries have already adopted Protego’s framework. Guatemala was the first , establishing a partnership with Huber and the IWH in June 2023 under the leadership of far-right then-president Alejandro Giammattei. The Protego project worked with the country’s Ministries of Health, Education and Social Development and developed a “Parent Child Communication Guide” that would promote IWH’s narratives on sex and family planning to Guatemalans.

Huber claims the guide, which was spread throughout the country via partnerships with influencers and faith and business leaders, has reached 3 million school-aged children in Guatemala.

Huber and Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni signing the agreement of their partnership on Protego in 2024. Screenshot via UBC Television Uganda YouTube .

Uganda, where gay sex is punishable by death , was the next country to adopt the framework in early 2024. Unlike in Guatemala, specific details have been difficult to access and not publicly shared, but promoting abstinence-only sex education has been a publicly stated priority.

Other countries, including Hungary and Burundi , have also signaled their support for Protego, but less is known about their actions on the matter.

What happens now?

While the new core group has not yet been officially established, statements by Lara and Huber suggest an intention to do so in the near future.

“[It will take] less time than people assume, because the hardest part is already done,” Huber said in her Washington Stand interview. “The coalition exists. The shared commitments are on paper and have held through changes of government in multiple countries.”

Ipas, in its briefing, emphasizes that there is still a way to go before the core group’s establishment and cautions advocates to “avoid overstating [its] legitimacy and power.”

However, Sjödin warns that the plans, and the danger they present, must be taken seriously.

“Currently, we are seeing quite an extensive and horrendous backlash against LGBTQ+ people,” she says. “What they potentially want to do here is to actually make inclusion of everyone more difficult.”