Friday 11 July 2014

Ban on LGBT Workshops


After closing down the Refugee Law Project, Uganda's parliament has now banned all LGBT workshops, including those to do with HIV/AIDS Awareness:


The Ugandan High Court has endorsed the government closure of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights workshop, saying that workshop participants were ‘promoting’ or ‘inciting’ same-sex acts. The judgement relied on a single statement from an ‘ex-gay’ who said that the organisation was ‘training homosexual youths to safely engage in the same-sex practices by distributing condoms.’

Let's just rewind in time to January 2013. SMUG were suing the hilariously titled Minister for Ethics & Integrity for arresting people at an LGBT workshop, long before the law was passed. The point disputed was that every citizen has the constitutional right to assembly. Only, SMUG never got to take Lokodo to trial, because the judge delayed the case long enough for the pending anti-gay bill to pass, criminalising gay people. And, of course, criminals don't have a right to assembly.

Sneaky little super villains.

[CORRECTION: No sooner did we post this, then we saw the ruling. Apparently the case wasn't dropped, but the results were as disappointing as you'd expect.]

No comments:

Post a Comment

Feel free to comment. Posts are moderated so there may be a delay before they appear. Thanks for reading!