Box Turtle BUlletin reported yesterday and today that the the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill will not be taken up by Parliament. They cite reports from state-owned television and newspapers and a Spanish newspaper.
Today’s report:
The chairman of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee had scheduled the Anti-Homosexuality Bill for debate in his committee, possibly as early as this week. But now, based on what Information Minister Kabakumba Masiko tells Uganda’s NTV, it appears that government has intervened to put a halt to the bill once and for all:
We had the Cabinet Subcommittee which gave us a report yesterday and we did realize that there are many things that are in the bill that are covered by other laws that are already in place. … And the law that is in offing, the Sexual Offenses Bill, will cover most of the other issues that were going to be covered.
Uganda President Yoweri Museveni directed a subcabinet committee to study the bill in January, 2010 amid growing international outcry over the proposed bill. In April, it was reported that the committee recommended that most of the bill be dropped with “useful provisions of the proposed law” incorporated into the Sexual Offenses Act. Which provisions the cabinet considered combining is not known. We currently do not have a copy of the Sexual Offenses Bill. The Bill’s sponsor, David Bahati, responded with a litany of issues which he felt were not covered:
We don’t have any prohibition on promotion of homosexuality anywhere, we don’t have any prohibition on same-sex marriage, we don’t have any prohibition in our laws on recruitment of homosexuality of our children, we don’t have any provision on counseling and caring. We want to make it very clear, we want Parliament to come up with a law that is specific and clear to address the emergent problem of homosexuality.
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, if passed, would have imposed the death penalty on gays and lesbians under certain circumstances, including for “repeat offenders” — which would apply to anyone who had more than one relationship. Ugandan law already provides either 20 years or lifetime imprisonment, depending on how prosecutors chose to charge the accused. The new law would also have lowered the bar for conviction, making mere “touching” for the perceived purpose of homosexual relations a criminal offense. The law threatened teachers, doctors, friends, and family members with three years imprisonment if they didn’t report anyone they suspected of being gay to police within twenty-four hours. The law very broadly criminalized all advocacy of homosexuality including, conceivably, lawyers who defended accused gay people in court. It even threatened landlords under a “brothel” provision if they knowingly rented to gay people.