Same-Sex Love Law: transnational trends

Abstract

On 27 June 2025, Kees Waaldijk held this academic farewell lecture as holder of the professorship in Comparative Sexual Orientation Law at Leiden University, on Friday 27 June 2025. He has held this sponsored chair (at Leiden Law School's Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies) from May 2011 until November 2025.

So far no written version of this lecture is available, but there is a brief online report about it, and a video recording of the lecture is available at https://video.leidenuniv.nl/media/t/1_6jo8uk0r (in that video the lecture itself starts at 00:02:18).

During this lecture a moving visualisation was shown of Kees Waaldijk's Global Index on Legal Recognition of Homosexual Orientation (GILRHO), which gives up to eight points to countries that -- over time -- have decriminalised same-sex sex, and/or have prohibited sexual orientation discrimination, and/or provide some degree of family law recognition to same-sex couples; the GILRHO scores are visualised in relation to Gross Domestic Product per capita (in constant US dollars, according to World Bank data), and in relation to the percentage of respondents in the various waves of the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, who mentioned 'homosexuals' as a group they would not want to have as neighbours. At the end of this lecture (in the video from 00:59:20), some words were spoken by professor Suzan Stoter (Dean of Leiden Law School), by professor Christa Tobler (on behalf of the Curatorium of the sponsored chair in comparative sexual orientation law), by professor Helen Duffy (on behalf of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies), and by Dr Seun Bakare (on behalf of Kees Waaldijk's colleagues worldwide). A full description of the methodology of GILRHO, and an analysis of its interaction with GDP per capita, can be found in the article: MV Lee Badgett, Kees Waaldijk & Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, ‘The relationship between LGBT inclusion and economic development: Macro-level evidence’, 120 World Development (August 2019) p. 1-14, available in open access (including, in Appendix A under “Download Spreadsheet”, the provisional 1966-2011 dataset of GILRHO). The GILRHO dataset upto 2025 has not yet been published.