March 21 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Parliament of Uganda has given the ‘green light’ on Tuesday to a controversial law that increases to ten years in prison the penalties for relations between people of the same sex in the country, where homosexuality is already illegal.
“We recognize that the Constitution contains non-derogable rights and in this process the Chamber has made an effort to recognize those non-derogable rights. However, the norms and aspirations of the people of Uganda will always be supreme,” the president of the Ugandan Constitution has indicated on her Twitter profile. Camera, Anita Among.
The bill, criticized by LGBT activists, has been approved unanimously amid homophobic comments. One of the parliamentarians has even gone so far as to ask for castration against homosexual people, as reported by DPA.
However, shortly after the start of the session, which lasted nearly six hours, some dissenting voices emerged. Fox Odoi, a deputy from the ruling National Resistance Movement party, has stated that the legislation “criminalizes people” and “contains provisions that are unconstitutional”, reported the newspaper ‘Monitor’.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) affirmed that the text, in addition to criminalizing LGBT people, violates “multiple fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution of Uganda” and other international covenants on civil rights, such as the African Charter of Human Rights.
The approval of this law comes after the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, accused Western countries of trying to “impose” the rights of the gay community in the country and stated that homosexuality “is a deviation from normality”. .
The Constitutional Court of Uganda invalidated a law promoted by Museveni in 2014 that sentenced gay people to life imprisonment, although its repeal did not imply the elimination of prison sentences. The new legislation approved this Tuesday is, in fact, a revision of said law.
