Guest Lecture: Dr. Rehan Abeyratne on Courts & LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age of Judicial Retrenchment

The Centre organized a virtual guest lecture to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the landmark decision in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India. The judgment, which decriminalized consensual same-sex relations, constitutes a significant constitutional moment in the advancement of equality, dignity, and individual autonomy within the Indian legal framework.

The lecture was delivered by Rehan Abeyratne, Professor and Associate Dean (Higher Degree Research) at the Western Sydney University School of Law. Professor Abeyratne’s academic work is situated at the intersection of constitutional law, comparative legal systems, and public law, and his scholarship is particularly attentive to the dynamics of judicial behaviour and rights adjudication across jurisdictions.

The discussion was structured around his recent monograph, ‘Courts and LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age of Judicial Retrenchment’, which interrogates the apparent tension between the progressive expansion of LGBTQ+ rights and the broader phenomenon of judicial retrenchment within liberal constitutional democracies. Drawing on comparative case studies from the United States, India, and Hong Kong, the lecture examined how constitutional courts have, in certain contexts, continued to articulate and protect LGBTQ+ rights notwithstanding a general contraction in the scope of rights-based jurisprudence.