Recognition of LGBTIQ+ rights has expanded rapidly over the last few decades, yet remain contentious in many countries. Debates over the religious, moral and political stakes of acknowledging these human rights have persisted on a global scale. The purpose of this study is to understand how international legal systems have expanded LGBTIQ+ rights. This will be done through examining LGBTIQ+ rights complaint cases before the United Nations (UN) treaty-based bodies to analyze how the precision and procedure of rights as well as the political dynamic between treaty bodies and member states impacts treaty bodies’ interpretations of rights. The UN complaints procedures allow individuals or groups to assert claims and challenge the denial of rights by the State outside of their own national court systems. While committee rulings on individual complaints are non-binding, decisions can be valuable advocacy tools that can empower domestic actors, validate claims of rights, and provide guidance for State action. The extent to which complaints processes are being used to assert the rights of LGBTIQ+ people has not yet been comprehensively examined. This paper will review the claims being made and the decisions arising out of them in the UN Jurisprudence Database to consider how rights and politics have influenced treaty body verdicts, and conclude that, while highly precise rules allow for clarity and uniformity in application, vague rights often result in disputes that give treaty bodies the opportunity to further define rights. Likewise, as treaty bodies resolve disputes, case rulings at times go against state preferences, demonstrating that rulings do not merely reflect member states’ positions. Although the focus of this paper is on LGBTIQ+ rights, this study provides a general framework for utilizing complaint cases to analyze how certain factors impact expansions of rights at the UN.