Senator PS Hussein Bourgi intends to table a bill on Saturday providing compensation for people convicted of homosexuality between 1942 and 1982. The elected official made this announcement on Wednesday August 3, on the eve of a trip to Orléans (Loiret) from the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne.
The latter must visit the LGBT + reception center GAGL 45, forty years after the law of August 4, 1982 which definitively decriminalized homosexuality in France. She will be accompanied by Isabelle Rome, Minister for Equality between Women and Men, Diversity and Equal Opportunities.
Senator Bourgi explains that he chose to table his bill on August 6, “a highly symbolic date since it corresponds to the 80th anniversary of the entry into force of the Vichy provisions coming to repress homosexuality”. The Vichy regime had introduced discrimination between heterosexual relations – the sexual majority then being fixed at 15 years – and homosexual relations, penalized if one of the partners was a minor (under 21 at the time).
Discrimination remained in force when the age of majority was lowered to 18 in 1974, before the left repealed it in 1982 and aligned sexual majority at 15, regardless of the sex of the partners. “Between 1942 and 1982, several tens of thousands of people were sentenced”remember Hussein Bourgi.
The text has already been co-signed by more than twenty PS senators, including Loiret senator Jean-Pierre Sueur and Paris senators Marie-Pierre de La Gontrie and Rémi Féraud. It will be proposed from Thursday for the signature of the other political groups. This bill would only concern 150 to 200 people, according to Hussein Bourgi.
The text echoes a column published on June 15 in the magazine Stubbornat the initiative of several associations for the defense of LGBT rights, and signed in particular by Michel Chomarat, himself convicted of homosexuality in 1977.