Rights groups sue Uganda over Kill the Gays law

Uganda’s second highest court took up a challenge to the country’s draconian Kill the Gays law this week, brought by a collection of advocacy groups and two dissenting members of Parliament, one of whom was instrumental in helping overturn the last iteration of the law in 2014.

The latest version, which criminalizes homosexuality in Uganda with prison terms — and the death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality” — was passed overwhelmingly by Parliament and signed into law in May by President Yoweri Museveni.

Related: Ugandan gay man fears for his life as he gets deported: “I have nowhere to go”

“There is a very high chance that I’ll be arrested, tortured, just for identifying as a gay man.”

It’s not yet known when the court will rule in the matter.

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The petitioners to the Constitutional Court include Fox Odoi-Oywelowo, one of two members of Parliament who voted against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The MP, once a senior legal counsel to President Yoweri Museveni, helped turn back the last version of the Kill the Gays law when it came before the court in 2014.

Supporters of the law have argued the West has imposed its corrupt values on Uganda for profit, like colonial powers in the past.

According to Ugandan State Minister for Foreign Affairs Henry Okello Oryem, Western nations have sought “to coerce us into accepting same-sex relationships using aid and loans,” Aljazeera reports.

Odoi-Oywelowo argues it’s other outside influences that are responsible for imposing “an ideology of hate” on Uganda.

“Homophobia has never been part of traditional African societies,” he told OpenDemocracy in March. Odoi-Oywelowo cites a multimillion-dollar effort by groups like Arizona-based Family Watch International to promote an extreme Christian Nationalist agenda in Uganda and across Africa.

That group is widely recognized as helping author both versions of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bills, in 2014 and 2023, and similar legislation in Kenya.

In September, in a speech before the African Bar Association, Family Watch International president Sharon Slater claimed that it was foreign countries promoting a secular agenda, not her organization, that were attempting a sexual and social “recolonization of Africa” through abortion and LGBTQ+ rights initiatives.

It’s not only gay people who are subject to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s extreme penalties. Other provisions include punishments for “promotion of homosexuality,” which criminalizes anyone associated with an LGBTQ+ organization, be it a landlord housing LGBTQ+ people or businesses or allies of advocacy groups.

Identifying or behaving “contrary to the binary categories of male and female” carries a possible 10-year prison sentence, as well.

Earlier in December, the Biden administration announced new visa bans on unnamed officials in Uganda responsible for “undermining the democratic process” in the country, including the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. It’s the latest in a long line of sanctions imposed by the U.S. and international community in protest of the extreme legislation.

In November, Washington expelled Uganda from the African Growth and Opportunity citing “gross violations” of human rights and other eligibility requirements.

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