Anti-homosexuality Legislation Research Articles

The flag and the stick: Aid suspensions, human rights, and the problem of the complicit public

Foreign aid donors often use, or are expected to use, the threat of aid suspensions in response to human rights violations. The use of such conditionality seeks to pressure the ‘recipient’ government into ending or preventing rights abuses. This article argues that this approach tacitly relies on the assumption that most citizens in the recipient country oppose their government’s rights violations. However, in recent years, and particularly linked to the rise of populism, there has been growing recognition of instances around the world in which significant parts of the public support government actions giving rise to human rights violations. Drawing in particular on the example of donor responses to recent efforts to introduce repressive anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda, the article argues that such cases present donors with a dilemma that arises because the threat of aid suspensions serves two distinct but related purposes: an instrumental function (‘the stick’), whereby the threat of withdrawing aid is used to pressure the ‘recipient’ government into ending the rights violation; and an expressive function (‘the flag’) that is often overlooked, whereby conditionality signals the donor government’s commitment to international human rights norms. While typically these two functions of aid conditionality reinforce one another, we show that when faced with a ‘complicit public’, the stick and flag come apart, generating the dilemma for donors. The threat of aid sanctions is likely to trigger a public backlash but refraining from effective criticism will undermine support for international human rights norms. Based on this analysis, the article provides a framework for recognizing and evaluating potential responses to this dilemma that considers the salient political and ethical features of such contexts. In doing so, it demonstrates the importance of understanding the political ethics of aid suspensions and other donor responses to human rights violations.

Gay Rights and the Politics of Anti-homosexual Legislation in Africa: Insights from Uganda and Nigeria

Gay Rights and the Politics of Anti-homosexual Legislation in Africa: Insights from Uganda and Nigeria

Homosexuality Legalization in Arab Countries: A Shifting Paradigm or a Wake-up Call

The study reported how the Arab world perceived homosexuality criminalization and decriminalization in opposition or in alignment with approaches determined in the pre and post-colonial eras in different European and American countries. The focus of the article was to explore the foundations of both homosexuality and anti-homosexuality legislation along with the historical background of the homosexuality issue. The study employed a meta-analysis of studies on homosexuality criminalization and decriminalization starting with the colonial period through the modern era. The methodology employed scientific literature in the analysis to make the study representative and not a priori stigmatizing. The analysis revolved around close readings of precolonial and postcolonial documents. The study looked at the historical evidence indicating the impact of imperial history on homosexuality as based on the dataset of 185 countries. The findings of the study underscored that the question of criminalizing or decriminalizing homosexuality in Arab countries remains debatable due to conflicting views of modernity on one hand and religious and cultural constraints on the other hand.

A Critical Comparative Law Analysis on Challenging Anti-Homosexual Legislation in Uganda

Globalisation has enabled Western countries and international organisations to use donor sanctions and economic trade benefits when trying to pressure non-Western countries to change their anti-sodomy laws. This, in turn, has led legal academics such as Katherine Franke and Stewart Chang to argue that this approach of legalising homosexuality and implementing LGBTQ rights evidences Western-imperialism and neo-colonialism. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate between these polar groups and its main focus is to add to the argument of the latter. This is because whereas there is legal commentary critiquing this aspect of globalisation from the perspective of South East Asian countries and Eastern European countries, there is a gap in the literature coming from African perspectives. Thus the paper will investigate anti-homosexual legislation in Uganda in order to argue that effective legal change to this legislation should come from a change in the normative attitudes of the Ugandan people. It seeks to analyse legal pluralism, legal transplants and legal transfers in order to highlight the importance of normative attitudes in law reform. Thus, the paper will assert that legal reform to anti-homosexual legislation that is resultant of external pressures, as opposed to a change in normative attitudes of the Uganda people, will be detrimental to the development of LGBTQ rights in Uganda. For full text, please click here

Anti-Homosexual Legislation and HIV-Related Stigma in African Nations: What Has Been the Role of PEPFAR?

Background: Gay men and other men who have sex with men are disproportionately burdened by HIV infection. Laws that penalize same-sex intercourse contribute to a cycle of stigma, homonegativity and discrimination. In many African nations, laws criminalizing homosexuality may be fueling the epidemic, as they dissuade key populations from seeking treatment and health care providers from offering it. Objectives: We analyzed the ways in which policies and practices of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program addressed pervasively harsh anti-homosexuality laws across Africa. Given the aim of the US PEPFAR program to reduce stigma surrounding HIV, we explored how PEPFAR may have used its influence to reduce the criminalization of homosexuality in the countries where it operated. Methods: We assessed homosexuality laws in 21 African countries where PEPFAR funding sought to reduce the HIV epidemic. We examined PEPFAR Policy Framework agreements associated with those countries, and other PEPFAR documents, for evidence of attempts to reduce stigma by decriminalizing homosexuality. Results: We found 16 of Africa’s 21 PEPFAR-funded countries had laws characterized as harsh in relation to homosexuality. Among the top eight PEPFAR-funded countries in Africa, seven had harsh anti-homosexuality laws. Most (14) of the 16 African ‘Partnership Framework’ (PEPFAR) policy agreements between African governments and the US State Department call for stigma reduction; however, none call for reducing penalties on individuals who engage in homosexual behavior. Conclusions: We conclude that while PEPFAR has acknowledged the negative role of stigma in fueling the HIV epidemic, it has, so far, missed opportunities to explicitly address the role of the criminalization of homosexuality in feeding stigmatizing attitudes. Our analysis suggests mechanisms like PEPFAR Partnership Framework agreements could be ideal vehicles to call for removal of anti-homosexuality legislation.

Anti-homosexual legislation and HIV-related stigma in African nations: what has been the role of PEPFAR?

ABSTRACTBackground: Gay men and other men who have sex with men are disproportionately burdened by HIV infection. Laws that penalize same-sex intercourse contribute to a cycle of stigma, homonegativity and discrimination. In many African nations, laws criminalizing homosexuality may be fueling the epidemic, as they dissuade key populations from seeking treatment and health care providers from offering it.Objectives: We analyzed the ways in which policies and practices of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program addressed pervasively harsh anti-homosexuality laws across Africa. Given the aim of the US PEPFAR program to reduce stigma surrounding HIV, we explored how PEPFAR may have used its influence to reduce the criminalization of homosexuality in the countries where it operated.Methods: We assessed homosexuality laws in 21 African countries where PEPFAR funding sought to reduce the HIV epidemic. We examined PEPFAR Policy Framework agreements associated with those countries, and other PEPFAR documents, for evidence of attempts to reduce stigma by decriminalizing homosexuality.Results: We found 16 of Africa’s 21 PEPFAR-funded countries had laws characterized as harsh in relation to homosexuality. Among the top eight PEPFAR-funded countries in Africa, seven had harsh anti-homosexuality laws. Most (14) of the 16 African ‘Partnership Framework’ (PEPFAR) policy agreements between African governments and the US State Department call for stigma reduction; however, none call for reducing penalties on individuals who engage in homosexual behavior.Conclusions: We conclude that while PEPFAR has acknowledged the negative role of stigma in fueling the HIV epidemic, it has, so far, missed opportunities to explicitly address the role of the criminalization of homosexuality in feeding stigmatizing attitudes. Our analysis suggests mechanisms like PEPFAR Partnership Framework agreements could be ideal vehicles to call for removal of anti-homosexuality legislation.

Acts of homonationalism: Mapping Africa in the Swedish media

Gay-friendliness and gender equality have been taken as signs of modern Western superiority over other cultural spheres and geographical spaces, particularly those of the Muslim world. In a similar manner, the promotion and defense of gay rights has become the crucible of othering discourses in relation to Africa. Across different cultural and national spaces, the meanings of citizenship, nationalism, modernity, colonialism and sovereignty are being negotiated in debates about anti-homosexuality on the continent. The focus of this article is the politics of mapping anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa in Swedish daily newspapers . Drawing on the work of Jasbir Puar and other feminist and queer scholars theorizing race and sexuality in relation to processes of nation-building, the authors analyze the mapping of the regulation of homosexuality in Africa as an instance of imaginative geographies. They investigate how journalistic rhetoric about homophobia on the African continent in Swedish daily newspapers relies on a politics of homonationalism and sexual exceptionalism in ‘gay liberation’ discourses.

Foreign Aid and Trade Capacity Development Recent Evidence from Uganda

Endemic supply side constraints including fluctuating output levels, deficient trade infrastructure, rampant non-tariff barriers and incapacity to ensure international quality standards continue to thwart the gainful participation of many Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in an increasingly liberal global trade environment. At its 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial Conference, the World Trade Organization launched its Aid for Trade (AFT) initiative aimed at coordinating global financial support for strengthening trade capacity in Least Developed Countries (LDCs). This paper examined the effect of foreign aid, particularly Official Development Assistance, on Uganda’s external trade and its AFT component in strengthening the country’s trade capacity. Using time series Error Correction Modelling and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and official national statistics, the paper finds small but positive aid influence on Uganda’s exports and imports and generally close alignment between aid and national priorities. However, given general aid volatility but more especially following the anti-homosexuality legislation and gross corruption allegations in the case of Uganda, the paper advises that external aid be treated as a supplement rather than a substitute for domestic financial resource mobilization in trade capacity development.

Call Me Kuchu

This paper examines Call Me Kuchu, a 2012 documentary that profiles a group of activists in Uganda as they respond to the introduction of anti-homosexuality legislation in the Ugandan Parliament, the exposure of members of the LGBT community in the Ugandan publication Rolling Stone, and the death of activist David Kato. Utilizing queer theory, transnational feminism, and critical media studies, the authors provide a close reading of the film's formal elements in relation to the geopolitical context in which the film circulates. They argue for a more reflexive filmmaking praxis as well as significant contextualization of the issues of LGBT identity and human rights claims in relation to post-colonial politics. Ultimately, they offer suggestions for employing transnational filmmaking praxis and engaging with the film as a dynamic artifact of transnational and post-colonial contexts.

The social-political dynamics of the anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda

abstractLegislative treatment of homosexual citizens of Uganda was variously categorised as vitriolic homophobia by the international LGBTIQ movement and human rights advocates. Extreme proposed penalties (including death, extradition and life imprisonment) contained in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (2009), which was amended and then passed as the Anti-Homosexuality Act (2014), sought to institutionalise State-inspired homophobia through legislation. Scholarship of the legal regime governing non-heteronormative sexualities in Uganda narrowly focuses on interpreting the law and its implications on individual homosexuals. Less analytical attention is focused on diverse appropriations of power and powerlessness by varied actors within the societal, national and international contexts in which this law was negotiated.Based on triangulation of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by an anthropologist and social justice activism by a legal scholar, this article critically analyses the social and political dynamics of the deeply polarised recriminalisation of homosexuality to move and sway diverse citizenry within and outside of Uganda. After discussing the contents, context and historical developments of the anti-homosexuality laws, as well as the constitutional petition that led to its annulment, we analyse the attendant contestations and debates within Parliament, the executive, judiciary and society. The varied, contradictory and opposing standpoints towards recriminalising homosexuality highlight the practical impossibility of generalising any social unit within Uganda as homogenously homophobic or universally opposed to same-sex practices. While proponents of anti-homosexuality legislation mobilised their position to sway candidates to give them votes during elections, opponents of the law built their social-political acumen as defenders of minority human rights, and stewards of good governance in the country. This legislative process was appropriated for political expediency by diverse actors. In conclusion, we assert that the anti-homosexuality law became a paradoxical symbol for nationalism, sovereignty, economic autonomy, Africanness, traditional culture, Christian conservatism, progressiveness, propriety, defiant sexualities, foreign intervention, and neo-imperialism.

Virtual access: the Ugandan ‘anti-gay’ movement, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender blogging and the public sphere

In recent years the proposal, passage and overturn of the Anti-Homosexuality Legislation in Uganda have brought an onslaught of international attention to the nation. Featured throughout the international press, Uganda is frequently depicted as a nation fixed in overt homophobia. Anti-gay discourse is omnipresent in the Ugandan public sphere, and reflects a broader moral revolution in the nation. Television and radio broadcasts, periodicals and evangelical Christian sermons frequently denounce the ‘growing threat’ that homosexuality poses to the nation. Yet, accessibility to the Internet has allowed some Ugandan lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) bloggers to express resistance, contesting anti-gay discourse dominating the Ugandan public sphere. In this way, LGBT blogs act as a site for claims of equal citizenship. By maintaining anonymity, the cybersphere provides a ‘safe space’ for the production of LGBT discourse by Ugandan bloggers. The purpose of this paper is to examine how two Ugandan bloggers have utilised the medium as a site of resistance to dominant anti-gay discourse, while expressing queer identity online. In the context of a bounded public sphere that limits the performance of ‘alternative’ sexualities, the Internet offers public space to claim Ugandan citizenship. Yet, limitations to online access both restrict the types and ways particular forms of sexuality are expressed, and reduce more ‘local’ or private manifestations detached from identity.

Os direitos de pessoas LGBTI em Uganda: redes transnacionais de advocacy e a lei anti-homossexualidade

Este artigo trata da disputa em torno dos direitos de pessoas LGBTI em Uganda, envolvendo duas redes transnacionais de advocacy dos anos 1990 à aprovação da mundialmente conhecida "lei anti-homossexualidade" ugandense. Elaborando sobre o clássico estudo de M. Keck e K. Sikkink sobre redes transnacionais de advocacy, o artigo busca identificar os principais atores nas redes, a mudança de escala na rede em prol dos direitos de pessoas LGBTI, suas estratégias, seus alvos e os frames que elas mobilizam. Finalmente, o texto indica limites da abordagem teórica de Keck e Sikkink e possíveis abordagens complementares.

Homophobic legislation and its impact on human security

Despite sustained opposition, legislation criminalising homosexuality persists and threatens human security in Africa in numerous ways. This paper explores the circumstances around the enactment of new anti-homosexual legislation in Nigeria and Uganda, examining five categories of insecurity faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the context of these laws: physical violence; extortion and blackmail; arbitrary arrest and detention; displacement from home; and loss of work.

Ethics and International Discourse in Social Work: The Case of Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Legislation

This paper discusses the role of international professional discourse in responding to cases of ethical and cultural dissonance. The discussion builds on the recent controversy over proposed legislation that would further criminalize homosexual behaviour in Uganda and the responses from international and regional professional organizations. For social work, the case was compounded by a statement from a local social work leader. The contributions and limitations of global ethical principles and international human rights standards in such cases are considered, with special attention to the salience of universalism and cultural relativism. Principles of discourse ethics and leadership ethics are also applied in the analysis. The authors conclude by recommending a moderately universalist stance that respects the dignity of all humans while preserving positive elements of African culture and worldview.

Statement from the University of the Witwatersrand pertaining to anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa

Statement from the University of the Witwatersrand pertaining to anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality, race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy

This article explores the ways that the popular diasporic novel Funny Boy, set in Sri Lanka but written from Canada by an exiled Sri Lankan born Tamil, intervenes in the country's contemporary geographies of difference. The novel itself explores a Tamil boy's struggle to negotiate life in Sinhala-dominated Colombo while also coming to terms with his emergent same-sex desire. By focusing specifically on the writing of two familiar middle-class Sri Lankan spaces central to the novel's narrative—the family home and the school—the article shows how these everyday geographies regulate and normalise carnal desire in a society which still operates anti-homosexual legislation. It also suggests how the erosion of the meanings of these familiar spaces is a tactic central to the main protagonist's sexual liberation. By reading these sexualised geographies through the polemic racialised Sinhala/Tamil divisions in contemporary Sri Lankan society, the paper shows how the novel makes an important political intervention in contemporary Sri Lankan politics where devolution and federal solutions to recent civil unrest have produced territorialised geographies of difference that prescribe ‘places for races’. By evoking the Funny Boy's fictive and sexualised geographies of exclusion and resistance, this article unsettles the logic that binds intra-racial solidarity, its cognate geographical modelling, and instead highlights the exclusions that exist at all levels in Sri Lankan society. Amma held up her hand to silence us. ‘That's an order,’ she said. ‘Why?’ I asked, ignoring her gesture. ‘Why do I have to play with the boys?’ ‘Why?’ Amma said. ‘Because the sky is so high and pigs can't fly, that's why.’ (Selvadurai, 1995, pp.18–19)

The myth of lesbian impunity: capital laws from 1270 to 1791.

The standard history of antihomosexual legislation states that lesbian acts were not punished by medieval or later laws. This essay challenges this view by documenting capital laws since 1270 in Europe and America. A major influence was Paul's condemnation in Romans I, 26. By 1400, the lex foedissimam, an edict of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximianus, issued in 287, was interpreted to justify the death penalty. Executions took place in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain. A brief survey of presently known male deaths in Europe and the Americas, which number about 400, also is included. This study draws on canon law and the commentaries of such jurists as Cino da Pistoia, Saliceto, López, Gómez, Farinacio, Cotton, Carpzow, Sinistrari, de Vouglans, and Jousse. It also discusses the records of a German trial of 1721, published elsewhere in this issue, that also led to the execution of a woman.

Assessing the effects of anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda on HIV prevention, treatment, and care services

Uganda's response to the HIV epidemic has been lauded for its robustness and achievements. However, a key component of HIV prevention programming has been missing, for men who have sex with men (MSM). The main reason cited has been criminalization of male homosexual behavior. In 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB) was introduced in the parliament to enhance existing anti-homosexuality law. A multi-disciplinary team made a Health Impact Assessment of the proposed AHB. The bill as tabled would severely increase punishments, increased closeting. Social capital of MSM would be eroded by clauses mandating reporting by friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Health-care professionals would have to inform on homosexuals. Mandatory HIV testing would be a blow to programming. Probable disclosure of HIV status in a public space (court) would also be a deterrent. Heftier punishments for those testing positive increases stigma and hobbles subsequent care. The AHB argues for exclusion, and more discrimination targeting persons living with HIV and sexual minorities. It will exacerbate the negative public health consequences of the existing legislation. The government of Uganda should review guidance documents published by authoritative bodies including the World Bank, World Health Organization to develop and bring to scale Human rights-affirming HIV prevention, treatment, and care responses.