Namibia’s High Court Decriminalizes Homosexuality

metroweekly.com:

Reuters following the court’s decision. “It is a great day for Namibia.”Human rights advocates argued that, even though Namibia’s laws prohibiting sodomy and “unnatural sexual offenses” were rarely enforced, their existence left gay and bisexual men living in fear of arrest.Téa Braun, the chief executive of Human Dignity Trust, said the success of Dausab’s lawsuit could help revive efforts to repeal other criminalization laws across Africa. “The message that the court sent today is that we have every right to belong and exist in this country and that the constitution protects us,” said Omar van Reenen, the co-founder of the Namibia Equal Rights Movement.The government is still considering the ruling and hasn’t decided whether to appeal it, Gladice Pickering, the justice ministry’s executive director, told Time magazine.The decision marks a significant victory for the LGBTQ community in the southern African nation and runs counter to recent trends in other sub-Saharan countries, where officials have sought to toughen penalties against LGBTQ people, particularly men, who engage in same-sex relations.

In sum, more than half of Africa’s 54 countries have some law criminalizing the practice.Last year, Uganda approved a punitive law that punishes same-sex conduct with long prison sentences, and, in cases of “aggravated homosexuality” — such as seducing or coercing someone to engage in same-sex acts — with the death penalty.In response to a legal challenge, the country’s Constitutional Court ultimately scuttled some provisions of the law, but kept the overall measure intact.Meanwhile, in Ghana, lawmakers passed a law that penalizes people who identify as LGBTQ with up to three years in prison.