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African anti-gay laws lead back to the West. Time for accountability [1]

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Date: 2023-11

Vast flows of money from Western anti-rights groups have been spent to eviscerate the rights of LGBTIQ people in Africa, setting the stage for much of the repressive and dehumanising anti-gay legislation on the continent today.

But while progressive allies in the West, and even Joe Biden’s US administration, may be acknowledging the havoc wreaked by these groups in Africa, they have remained both unwilling and unable to act decisively to stop them.

The World Congress of Families, Family Watch International, and the Fellowship Foundation are some of the US groups linked to the organising that set the stage for the 2014 and 2023 anti-LGBTIQ laws in Uganda; a similar bill underway in Ghana; and another feared to be on the verge of introduction in Kenya.

All three countries retain British colonial-era penal laws on homosexuality that criminalise sex “against the laws of nature”, but legislation within the past decade has prescribed extreme penalties, including death.

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African rights campaigners have called for these groups to be sanctioned – but have been met with silence.

Ineffective responses

To have genuine and meaningful impact, the backing provided to African queer communities must be more than just finger-wagging at African homophobes. Rather, the West must finally listen to and act on more than 15 years of efforts by African queer organisers to bring to account US groups and citizens linked to the fashioning of repressive legislation on the continent, but this has not been the case.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/africa-queer-rights-lgbtiq-western-anti-rights-groups-accountable/

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