DAKAR, Senegal — Lawmakers in Senegal have drafted a bill that would double prison time for those convicted of engaging in same-sex relations and “LGBTQ behaviors,” supporters of the text said Tuesday.
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The measure to ramp up punishments comes as harassment toward sexual minorities mounts in the West African nation, advocates say, and as a similar proposal advances through Ghana’s parliament.
“This is absolutely ridiculous for a country that is supposed to be known for its hospitality,” said Djamil Bangoura, a Senegalese activist for LGBTQ rights. “More and more people are being judged and tortured and imprisoned for their sexual orientation.”
Gay sex is already penalized here with up to five years in prison. The new bill would allow for 10-year sentences, one of its authors, Alioune Souare, told Reuters. The text should reach parliament by Friday, he added.
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Same-sex relations are outlawed in more than half of Africa’s 54 nations. Some countries, including Botswana and Gabon, have knocked down bans in recent years, but others have maintained penal codes inherited from former colonial powers. In some places, the punishment is death.
Senegal prohibits “unnatural acts” between people of the same sex. The law was seldom enforced in 2018, according to the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report, but arrests picked up between September and December 2020, when advocates reported police jailing more than three dozen people on charges related to their sexual orientation.
In May, hundreds of anti-gay protesters rallied in Dakar, calling for harsher treatment of members of the LBGTQ community, according to Agence France-Presse. Among their demands: making it a crime to identify as anything other than heterosexual.
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“We will kill them, or we will burn them alive,” one local official said at the time. “We’ll never accept homosexuality.”
The following month, videos emerged on social media of four men being beaten and then detained in Senegal, according to France 24.
The spectrum of sexuality has long been taboo in Senegal and its neighboring countries. When President Barack Obama visited the seaside capital in 2013, he publicly urged the Senegalese leader, Macky Sall, to defend the rights of sexual minorities.
“We are not ready to decriminalize homosexuality,” Sall responded, sparking a wave of public praise. (“No, We Can’t,” one newspaper headline declared the next day.)
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On Tuesday, opposition leaders pressed Sall — who won a second presidential term in 2019 — to go further, saying he should cement his stand against Western influence with a tougher law.
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“Not to vote on the bill criminalizing homosexuality will be equivalent to its legalization,” one rival politician, Amadou Ba, told local media.
The Senegalese proposal resembled a bill that Ghana’s parliament is debating. A leaked draft of the text in July revealed a broad range of potential new offenses: organizing efforts to help sexual minorities, donating to LGBTQ causes and posting supportive messages on social media.
“This has set a dangerous precedent that emboldens homophobic groups to mobilize,” said Danny Bediako, director of Rightify Ghana, a human rights group, because they can say, “ ‘even Ghana has done it.’ ”
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