NOVANEWS
SALMA YAQOOB: ‘Ugandan parliament drops bill that would jail gay people for life’
Tomorrow, February 24, marks the one-year anniversary of the signing of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. The law criminalized the existence of LGBTI people, not only outlawing their relationships but also advocacy on their behalf. In addition to stripping away fundamental rights, it has led to increased extra-legal violence against vulnerable sexual minorities. CCR has long believed that as a U.S. organization we have a special obligation to hold U.S. actors accountable for the harm they do to peoples around the world, be they the government officials who authorized torture of detainees, the private military contractors who oversaw the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or others.
That is why we also represent Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) in its lawsuit against Springfield, MA extremist Scott Lively. Lively is a one-man persecution consulting operation, traveling the world to work with leaders to strip LGBTI people of fundamental rights. Unfortunately, he has been quite successful. He has been active in Uganda since 2002, and played a significant role in the crafting of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. While the law was later invalidated on a technicality by a Ugandan court, the damage he has helped wreak there is far greater than the legislated repression of one law — like a “nuclear bomb” as he has claimed. Using the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which CCR pioneered as a tool to pursue international human rights violations, we are suing Lively for persecution.
It is the first case ever using the ATS to defend LGBTI people’s rights. In 2013, a judge rebuffed Lively’s attempt to have SMUG v. Lively dismissed, marking another first: recognition that widespread/systematic denial of fundamental rights on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity constitutes a crime against humanity. The film God Loves Uganda, which documents the larger phenomenon of the rightwing Christian export of homophobia to Africa and is an educational tool in contextualizing our case, is now available on Netflix, iTunes and DVD.
