Colombia Quits the Global LGBTI Rights Coalition It Was Co-Chairing
Six weeks after Abelardo de la Espriella took office, Colombia pulled out of the Equal Rights Coalition with immediate effect, halfway through its co-chairmanship with Spain. The government says rights aren't affected. Advocates and the national ombudsperson disagree.
Colombia has withdrawn from the Equal Rights Coalition, the intergovernmental group of more than 40 countries that works together to protect the rights of LGBTI people. It did so while it was co-chairing the coalition.
The decision was communicated on Thursday, 17 September, in a diplomatic note from Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the coalition’s Executive Committee and to the government of Spain, Colombia’s co-chair. According to Publimetro Colombia, the note said the government had decided on Colombia’s withdrawal “effective as of today.” It thanked Spain and civil society organisations for their work during the co-chairmanship. It gave no reason.
”Not a priority”
The explanation came from elsewhere. Spanish newspaper El País reported, in coverage cited by Publimetro and Marie Claire Colombia, that Vice Minister for Migration and Consular Affairs Pedro Agustín Roa told a coalition meeting that participation “is not a priority” for the current government. He described it as an initiative of the previous administration.
Colombia and Spain had taken on the co-chairmanship for 2025–2027. Leaving now means walking away from that role partway through the term.
In a public statement reported by Marie Claire Colombia, Roa said the decision “in no way” means rights are being affected. He argued that Colombia already has a robust body of protections in its Constitution, public policies, regulations and Constitutional Court rulings protecting people on the basis of sexual orientation.
Why the coalition matters
The Equal Rights Coalition was founded in 2016 at a global conference on LGBTI human rights in Montevideo, led by Uruguay and the Netherlands. It gives member governments a formal space to coordinate diplomacy, share policy and work with civil society and multilateral bodies on LGBTI rights. It has no power to enforce anything. What it offers is visibility, peer pressure and a network.
Its members still include most of Colombia’s neighbours and regional peers: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Uruguay, alongside Canada and most of Western Europe. That’s why the exit reads as a signal. Colombia wasn’t a passive member. It was helping to lead the group.
Advocates: a setback, and a question of timing
Caribe Afirmativo, one of Colombia’s best-known LGBTIQ+ organisations, represented Colombian civil society in the coalition. It criticised the government for leaving while still co-chairing, according to Publimetro. The group asked for a public explanation of the decision and objected that civil society wasn’t consulted beforehand. It also argued that Colombia had spent years building a position of international leadership on these issues.
One account of the coalition meeting, published by Marie Claire Colombia, described Caribe Afirmativo’s director, Wilson Castañeda, pointing out that Colombia’s interest in the coalition went back to the government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018). In other words, it wasn’t simply a project of the outgoing left-wing administration. According to that account, the vice minister didn’t respond.
The sharpest institutional response came from inside the Colombian state. Colombia’s ombudsperson, Iris Marín, said the decision didn’t match the country’s reality, Marie Claire Colombia reported. She cited figures from the Attorney General’s Office: 68 trans women murdered between 2024 and April 2026, and 148 homicides of LGBTIQ+ people in 2025. “LGBTIQ+ people require the backing of the State,” she said. “The State cannot stop giving it.”
Civil society counts are higher still. Caribe Afirmativo’s annual report, which we covered earlier this month, documented 270 killings of LGBTIQ+ people in Colombia in 2025.
A government that promised to end “gender ideology”
The withdrawal is the clearest concrete move yet on LGBTIQ+ issues by President Abelardo de la Espriella. The far-right lawyer narrowly beat Senator Iván Cepeda in June’s runoff and was sworn in on 7 August. During the campaign he pledged to end so-called “gender ideology” in Colombia.
Leaving an international coalition doesn’t change a single Colombian law. Marriage equality, which the Constitutional Court established in 2016, still stands. So does the body of court rulings Roa himself pointed to. What the withdrawal changes is Colombia’s posture. A country that was helping to lead global LGBTI diplomacy has stepped back from it, at a moment when violence at home is rising and its own ombudsperson is asking the state to do more, not less.
For Colombia’s LGBTIQ+ movement, the question now is whether this is a symbolic retreat or the first of several. The next signs to watch are domestic: funding for protection programmes, how hate-crime law is enforced, and whether the government’s promise that rights won’t be affected holds up when it’s tested at home.
