Rights Groups Fighting Proposed Homophobic Legislation in Uganda

A coalition of 17 local and international human rights groups have joined together to fight wide-ranging anti-homosexual legislation introduced this week in Uganda’s parliament. The coalition says restrictions move beyond bedroom conduct to challenge basic freedoms of expression and assembly and place barriers against the promotion of HIV/AIDS prevention projects. Executive director Cary Alan Johnson of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) says the law’s discriminative and harsh punitive features represent a last-ditch effort by anti-gay and evangelical groups to restrict personal freedoms in Uganda and in other African countries, and he hopes the rights groups can prevent the bill’s passage. “Over the course of the last year, there’s been an increasing pattern of homophobic discourse at play in Uganda, including a conference that occurred several months ago, in which a number of US evangelical leaders came to Uganda to promote reparative therapy and other types of human rights violations against Ugandan LGBT people…and our feeling is that the bill is targeting not just LGBT people, but freedom of expression and a broad level of political discourse in general,” he noted. Full Story from VOA News: http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/2009-10-16-voa5.cfm

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