Institute of Development Studies

World AIDS Day: Uganda’s new Anti-Homosexuality Bill violates human rights

Andrea Cornwall - 1 December 2009

The theme for this year's World AIDS Day is universal access and human rights. The two are inextricably linked. To be able to access services, including treatment, people need to be able to enjoy certain rights and freedoms. It is a violation of human rights to deny people this access.

Yet legislation that makes same-sex sexual relations a crime continues to threaten lives in many parts of the world. Out of the 53 countries of the Commonwealth, 40 have failed to follow Britain's suit in repealing archaic colonial legislation that makes same-sex sexual relations an offence - in some cases punishable by death. Stigma, fear, invisibility and exclusion are serious barriers to access to services, including advice, information, condoms and treatment. The violent face of homophobic discrimination, experienced the world over, is especially toxic in contexts like these.

Uganda's new legislation

Uganda is now planning new legislation that will violate the fundamental human rights of sexual minorities, compound their exclusion from access to services and exacerbate the stigma experienced by people living with HIV and AIDS. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill received its first reading last month. It criminalises gay sex - rendering those accused of this ‘crime' liable to life imprisonment. For those who prove to be HIV positive, the penalty is death.

The impact on HIV and AIDS treatment

It is not only sex that will be illegal. Mere touch will be an offence under legislation and citizens can be imprisoned for up to three years for failing to report homosexual activity among friends, work colleagues and family. Stephen Lewis, the former UN Special Envoy for HIV and AIDS in Africa has described the bill as ‘an omnibus violation of the human rights of sexual minorities... a veritable charter of malice.' If the bill goes through then even belonging to an LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) organisation will become a crime. Providing services - including advice and condoms - to LGBT people, will be outlawed. 'Promoting homosexuality' will attract a minimum sentence of five years.

As Stephen Lewis points out, ‘What is put at terrible risk here - beyond the threat of the death penalty for HIV-positive homosexuals - is the entire apparatus of AIDS treatment, prevention and care. It's profoundly ironic that the country that's seen as emblematic of success in fighting the pandemic is now contemplating such a decisive step backwards. The effect of this legislation will inevitably be to demonise homosexuality even further, to intensify stigma, to drive gay men and women underground, to terrify them in their everyday lives, to diminish dramatically the prospect of counselling and testing to establish HIV status, to make it virtually impossible to reach homosexuals with the knowledge and education and condoms that prevent the spread of AIDS.'

A violation of human rights

In a country with an estimated half a million LGBT people, this proposed legislation promotes the denial of access and the violation of human rights. It is profoundly wrong for the donors who supply the 74 per cent of Uganda's GDP to turn a blind eye, and pretend that business as usual can carry on whilst the fundamental human rights of LGBT Ugandans are so directly under threat.

Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a coalition of LGBT organisations, has called on the Ugandan government for ‘a national strategy on HIV/AIDS that drives a more coordinated, non-discriminatory and effective response to the epidemic.' SMUG urges government and HIV/AIDS service providers to:

• Include men who have sex with men (MSM) and women who have sex with Women (WSW) in Uganda's National AIDS Strategic Plans
• Designate a human rights bureau position to monitor LGBT concerns
• Repeal/reform laws that criminalise homosexuality
• Improve human rights reporting on violence and discrimination targeting LGBT communities

Sexuality and development

Frank Mugisha from SMUG (Sexual Minorities of Uganda) participated in a recent IDS-UNAIDS-UNDP symposium in Cape Town on ‘Untying Development's Straightjacket'. The symposium, a joint initiative between the Participation and Development Relations Programme, Pathways of Women's Empowerment, the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme, the IDS HIV and Development Programme, UNAIDS and UNDP, focused on the importance for development of recognising the extent to which implicit and explicit heteronormativity - the unquestioning acceptance of institutionalised forms of heterosexuality as the norm - causes harm and injury, including poverty and human rights violation. The symposium looked for ways out of the 'straightjacket' of heteronormative development policy and practice that would permit the recognition of the human rights of each and every one of us to loving and sexual relationships of our own choosing.

If the Anti-Homosexuality Bill is passed, hundreds of thousands of Ugandans will be denied their fundamental human rights. Britain, as the original architect of the discriminatory laws that remain on the statute books of so many of its former colonies has an important role to play in ensuring that British aid does not abet regimes of this kind in such flagrant abuses of human rights. India's repeal of Section 377 of the Penal Code earlier this year shows that such change is possible. Now it is time for other countries to follow their example, as a pathway to the universal access and human rights called for on this year's World AIDS Day.

Andrea Cornwall is a Fellow in the Participation Team at IDS and Programme Director for the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Partnership Consortium.

Image: Chris de Bode/ Panos

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Related Publications

• (2009) Sexuality and the Development Industry, Brighton:
• Cornwall, A. and Jolly, S. (2006) 'Sexuality Matters', IDS Bulletin 37.5, Brighton: IDS
• Harcourt, W., Cornwall, A., and Jolly, S. (2009) 'Sexuality and Development', Development 52.1, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jolly, S. (2006) 'Not So Strange Bedfellows: Sexuality and International Development', Development 49.1:77–80, Palgrave Macmillan
• Jolly, S. (2010) 'Sexuality and Poverty: What have they got to do with each other?' in Izugbara, C., Undie, C.C. and Wanjiku Khamasi, J. (eds), Old Wineskins, New Wine: Readings in Sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa, New York : Nova Science Publishers
• Correa, S. and Jolly, S. (2006) 'Sexuality, Development, Human Rights' , Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs