Anti-gender discourse in the contestation of human rights: Observations from Poland’s PiS in the European Parliament

The current paper raises the following questions: how does Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party respond to accusations that they are violating the EU’s human rights norm in the European Parliament (EP) and what implications may such responses have for human rights in the EU? Based on a discourse analysis of 18 EP plenary debates centred around LGBT+ and reproductive rights, this analysis reveals that PiS uses a number of strategic arguments in defence of behaviour considered to be in violation of human rights. The analysis also indicates that the discourses of PiS politicians evoke both the normative frameworks endemic to their national and regional contexts as well as a global discourse called Anti-Gender Discourse (AGD). PiS engaged with AGD to contest the Union’s human rights norm and frame their alleged norm violation as an attempt to oppose the so-called ‘gender agenda.’ As a community of states bound by shared norms, the European Union (EU) strives to achieve an image of normative harmony regarding its fundamental norms, such as human rights. For decades, it worked to articulate the advancement of LGBT+ and reproductive rights as matters of human rights. However, the EU’s endemic diversity and the ambiguity of even its fundamental norms (Mos, 2020) make attempts to present concordant normative understandings challenging. This, in turn, leaves room for norms to be violated and for (alleged) norm violators to strategically employ norm contestation (the disagreement about the meaning of norms and/or the scope of their implementation) to address or refute allegations of norm violation. In the EU, this back-and-forth plays out in institutions like the EP, which has, of late, become a venue for debate about the meaning and content of norms like human rights. It is here that members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and representatives from other EU institutions call upon other MEPs and other national representatives to respond to allegations that the EU’s human rights norm is being violated and here that these alleged violators can contest the cataloguing of ‘controversial’ rights, like LGBT+ and reproductive rights as matters of human rights. Poland’s ruling PiS party provides a striking example regarding LGBT+ and reproductive rights. In the EP, PiS defends controversial domestic policy, which appears to clash with the Union’s extant human rights norms and has resulted in Poland being labelled both the 'worst country in the EU for LGBT people' and one of the worst countries for access to contraception and abortion on the continent (Armstrong, 2020; Tilles, 2022, 2021). What until now remained underexplored, however, are both the content of this contestation (how are potential norm violations legitimised?) and the glaring similarities between PiS’s arguments and the wider AGD, which may have specific implications for the EU. In order to address both points, this research brings together both literature about norm contestation and literature documenting the rise of the Anti-Gender Movement and anti-gender backlash in Europe and beyond.