Into the Heart Of Darkness? Uganda and Nigeria Pass Anti-Homosexuality Laws

On the same day that the Indian government asked its Supreme Court to review its decision on India's laws criminalizing homosexuality, the Ugandan Parliament has passed the infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill and, as if in sync, the Nigerian Senate rubber-stamped the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill. The Nigerian Bill. as well as outlawing gay marriage and prescribing jail terms for anyone who attends such a marriage, bans LGBT organizations altogether. The Ugandan Bill promises legal sanctions so extreme that life imprisonment will now follow on convictions of repeat "offenders" for "homosexual offences." A last minute attempt to introduce a more lenient 14-year-sentence was rejected by Members of Parliament who instead maintained the draconian proposal. But this is only one aspect of a terrible law.

It isn't just LGBT people who will be targeted; anyone, whether family, friends, teachers or colleagues, who doesn't report homosexual conduct to the police is liable to be fined or sent to prison for up to seven years. Provisions in the new Ugandan law include proposals for criminal sanctions for anyone testing or treating LGBT people for sexually transmitted diseases who does not report them as gay to the authorities within 24 hours. Any one talking about or writing about gay rights will equally fall foul of the law: I could not publish this article and you could not read it. Last year, the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, promised that the Bill would be passed as a "Christmas gift" for the people of Uganda. It took her a year but Kadaga's decidedly unchristian gift has now been wrapped up in time for the Holidays. Parliament even thanked her in a special motion. The Ugandan and Nigerian Bills now only await their Presidents' signature.

It's too early to tell, but I suspect the recent decision of the Indian Supreme Court to overturn the Delhi High Court's ruling in 2009, which decriminalized homosexuality in India, might have something to do with these Bills passing. The judges declared that it was up to legislatures to review laws, and that's exactly what the Ugandan and Nigerian legislatures have just done. The fact that Uganda's Bill violates Uganda's international human rights treaty obligations doesn't seem to matter much - provisions within it allow for an automatic derogation from the relevant treaty clauses - but this Bill also violates the country's own Constitution . One has to wonder just how much a government which turns on a small, insignificant minority of its own people in this way, and rips up its own constitutional framework in the process, has to hide. So far-reaching and authoritarian are the Bill's provisions, no one in the Ugandan legislature or government who voted for this law could credibly claim that they believed in human rights. And yet in November last year Kadaga was chairing a session at a human rights conference in Westminster with the great and the good of the UK Parliament.

"anyone, whether family, friends, teachers or colleagues, who doesn't report homosexual conduct to the police is liable to be fined or sent to prison for up to seven years."

Wow!

Not that targeting LGBT is fine n dandy but that little bit makes it far more sinister than just old bigots making hate laws. It's so wide open to interpretation too, I can imagine it "so, prove you didn't know they were gay".

it wasn't that long ago that homosexuality was against the law in this country.

Though Uganda recently passed legislation imposing lifetime imprisonment for homosexuality, the country continues to be among those with the highest number of internet searches for gay pornography, reports the Guardian.

Recently, Google published statistics listing the countries with the greatest number of searches for gay porn on the web and found Uganda ranked third, behind Kenya and Pakistan.
Uganda Among World's Top Gay Porn Consumers

Despite the county’s antigay laws, Uganda is among the countries racking up the greatest number of internet searches for gay pornography.

Roger Ross Williams, director of the award-winning documentary God Loves Uganda, told the Huffington Post he believes the more government tries to repress sex and sexuality, the more it will continue to flourish underground. "When you have a repressive society like that, people are repressed, so it goes underground," he said. "They're obsessed with sex."

But Williams was quick to point out that the high numbers of internet searches for gay pornography in antigay nations such as Uganda are not necessarily reflective of the country's LGBT population, but instead reflect the society's curiosity about sex in general. "Culturally, you don't talk about sex in Uganda,” Williams explained. “What this bill has done, it brought homosexuality in the public conversation. People are curious."