the Constitutional Court confirms an “anti-homosexuality” law denounced by associations and the UN

The text provides for heavy penalties for people having homosexual relations and “promoting” homosexuality.

The Ugandan Constitutional Court on Wednesday April 3 rejected an appeal seeking the annulment of a repressive anti-LGBT+ law in this East African country, a decision that outraged human rights organizations. Baptized “anti-homosexuality law 2023”the text provides for heavy penalties for people having homosexual relations or engaging in “promotion” of homosexuality. A crime of“aggravated homosexuality” is punishable by the death penalty, a sentence which has, however, not been applied for years in Uganda.

The announcement of the vote for this law, in March 2023, aroused serious concern from several Western countries, international institutions such as the UN or the World Bank and human rights organizations, who had called for its repeal. . The United States had imposed sanctions against the country.

Sharing his “consternation”the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, again urged, in a statement on Wednesday, the Ugandan government to “repeal in its entirety” the text, which he described last year as “probably the worst in the world of its kind”.

Some censored provisions

Ugandan human rights activists, two law professors from a university in the capital Kampala and two parliamentarians from the ruling party had approached the Constitutional Court to block this text which they considered illegal.

“Having ruled, … we refuse to overturn the anti-homosexuality law in its entirety nor will we grant a permanent injunction against its enforcement”, declared one of the magistrates. The five judges, however, removed several provisions that they considered incompatible with international conventions, such as penalizing the failure to denounce homosexual acts.