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

The current paper raises the following questions: how does Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party justify the contestation of human rights in the European Parliament (EP) and what might this indicate about the aims of such contestation? Based on a discourse analysis of the contributions of PiS politicians to 18 EP plenary debates about LGBT+ and reproductive rights, the analysis focuses on the concepts of reactive and proactive norm contestation developed by Antje Wiener (2014) to show that PiS uses a number of strategic arguments in defence of its contestation. The analysis also indicates that the discourses of PiS politicians evoke both the normative frameworks endemic to its national and regional contexts as well as a global discourse called anti-gender discourse (AGD). PiS engaged with AGD to frame their contestation 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 present an image of normative conformity regarding its fundamental norms, such as human rights. For decades, it has 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 hegemonic normative narratives challenging. This, in turn, leaves room for norm contestation, or disagreement about the meaning of norms. This contestation plays out in EU 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 parties in some member states contest the cataloguing of ‘controversial’ rights, like LGBT+ and reproductive rights as matters of human rights, with Poland’s ruling PiS party providing a striking example. 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 unclear, however, were the aims of such contestation—whether it is used to outright reject the human rights norm (reactive contestation) or whether it serves as an attempt to re-articulate and co-shape the human rights norm (proactive contestation) in the EU. The results of the discourse analysis presented in this paper suggest that this contestation goes beyond the disapproval of the EU’s extant human rights norm and vies to redefine human rights Union-wide as well. This indicates the presence of both reactive and proactive contestation in PiS’s discourse.