The bill could be presented already in the next parliamentary session, either in its current, on in an amended form. However, since it will then be presented to a new parliament, with new members, it will have to go back to the very beginning of the legislative process, including getting clearance from the Minister of Finance and facing public consultations by various parliamentary committees.
The news that the bill could be approved and made law generated massive international protests. More than 1.6 million signatures from around the world were collected in a matter of days and handed over to the Ugandan parliament. Once again, on a global scale, the media coverage was enormous, and the international community of diplomats, foreign affairs politiians and advisers etc. also played their important part by voicing their concern to the Ugandan parliament.
Frank Mugisha, leader of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), said: "Brave Ugandan LGBT activists and millions of people around the world have stood together and faced down this horrendous anti-homosexuality bill. The support from the Avaaz global community has tipped the scales to prevent this Bill going forward. Global solidarity has made a huge difference".
Tabled as a private proposal by MP David Bahati, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was for over a year ‘dormant’ at committee level, but seemed only days ago to be moving fast to the next stage, quite possibly bringing it closer to being passed and turned into law. The stage it entered was the so-called second and third readings, which can take place on the same day. If that had happened, it would only await presidential consent to become law.
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The current session of the Ugandan Parliament closes on Thursday 12th of May, i.e. in less than a week, and if the Bill is not passed before then, it will have to be reintroduced in the next parliamentary session. This implies that if parliament is keen on passing the Bill now, it will happen within a week.Drawing from recent experience with other controversial Bills, this can be done. Today, the committee heard submissions from the religious right in Uganda.
-If the bill passes, we cannot even be allowed to do our work, says Frank Mugisha, director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).
Uganda’s LGBTI community has already felt the repression that the bill must take its share of the responsibility for, with increased harassment, threats and intimidation, including violent attacks. Searches of activitists’ houses and offices, landlords terminating contracts, media outings with pictures, names and addresses of alleged homosexual individuals accompanied by encouragements for anyone to attack them, are all among the experiences members of the LGBTI community have suffered. Meanwhile, impunity prevails. Only weeks after the magazine ‘Rolling Stone’ outed ‘Uganda’s 100 top homos,’ David Kato, a leding sexual minorities’ rights activist whose name and picture featured on the front page of that Rolling Stone issue, was found killed in his own home.
Proposed 18 months ago, the bill attracted international condemnation, including from US President Barack Obama. Several international leaders, among them Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Jonas Gahr Støre have raised concerns with the deteriorating security and human rights situation for Uganda’s LGBTI community in direct conversations with Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni.
Museveni has himself assembled a subcommittee, officially to call for the withdrawal of the bill. But HRHF’s Niels Jacob Harbitz, Regional Manager for East and Horn of Africa, comments: -Museveni’s position is well known. He is fiercely against equal rights for homosexuals; for homosexuals to enjoy the same human rights as any other Ugandan. This is precisely why there has always been a particular legislation for this community in Uganda, with the very clear purpose of legalizing and institutionalising discrimination, rather than providing protection and ensuring equal rights for all. In combination with near total impunity for any and all attacks on homosexuals, the situation for the entire community is already very difficult.
-The strategy for the bill to become law has probably been to come out very strongly, continues Harbitz, so as to be able to give room for a seemingly reasonable compromise. The Church of Uganda, a hugely important political actor, has only expressed concern with the the death penalty element of the bill. Hence, retracting on this issue will bring the church on board. And whoever wins the church’s approval in Uganda, on almost any issue, has come very close to winning through with whatever it is.
-Furthermore, I see the subcomittee as a decoy, adds Harbitz, intended to please the donor / diplomacy community who stands united in their concern about the bill, but so far pretty impotent in doing much about their concern. Museveni may well rely upon the widespread anti-gay sentiments of his country and let the Parliament decide, knowing very well what the outcome will be. My guess is that he will then abstain from using his presidential veto, with reference to the importance of letting democracy have its way, regardless of his personal opinion. I’d be surprised to see him express regret if this is how it goes. But this way, Museveni may even score a point or two with the same donor / diplomacy community, for respecting the parliament’s majority, and thus presumably the will of his own people.
The bill calls for seven years’ imprisonment of anyone exercising the fundamental right to freedom of expression and assembly in the area of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) human rights. Seven years’ imprisonment will also be the punishment for anyone who ‘aids, abets, counsels or procures another to engage in acts of homosexuality’. Even landlords who rent rooms to homosexuals could get seven years.
-In Uganda, none of this has lifted almost anyone’s eyebrow, observes Harbitz. -What has caused a bit of controversy, is only the inclusion of the death penalty. The original bill proposes that anyone convicted of a homosexual act would face life imprisonment. It also mandates the death penalty for active homosexuals living with HIV or in cases of same-sex rape. The same would apply to ‘serial offenders’. Now MP Bahati says that the death penalty clause is likely to be dropped from the bill. With reference to the Museveni-initiated subcommittee, Bahati elaborates that if this committee recommends the death penalty to be removed, "I would concede".
Meanwhile, the media have been accompanied by church leaders in stepping up their harassment, also in the form of expressing explicit support in a growing number of the country’s churches of the bill’s passage into law. On 13 April, the New York Times reported that Pastor Martin Ssempa, a cleric working with MP David Bahati, bribed witnesses to testify on behalf of the bill before Speaker of Parliament Edward Ssekandi. In David Kato’s funeral, the pastor appointed to preach took the opportunity to further harass the entire LGBTI community by way of condemning homosexuality. Moreover, it is well documented that wealth congregations in the US back congregations in Uganda in their encouragement of further discrimination of gays.
It is Stephen Tashobya, Chairman of the legal and parliamentary affairs committee, who now says the bill may come up for a vote before the Ugandan parliament’s session ends on 12 May. If this is so, the international community has only days to mobilise for as strong and sustainable support and protection strategy for the Ugandan LGBTI community as possible, accompanied by an equally strong condemnation of the legislation towards Ugandan authorities.
Related letter of concern:
