Box Turtle Bulletin

Ugandan Gays Now Allowed To Meet? Anti-Homosexuality Bill “Shelved”?

That’s what the Associated Press is reporting. But I think it’s safe to say that the best way to approach this AP article is to read it and then believe the opposite. It has two whoppers: 1) it claims that the Ugandan government says that LGBT advocates are now free to meet, and 2) that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill has been “shelved.” From what I’m seeing, neither appears correct.

Let’s take the first point first. In response to growing international criticism over two recent raids of gay rights conferences, the Ugandan government issued this statement signed by Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo:

Kampala

Uganda has come under criticism for intervening in a gay activists’ meeting that was taking place at a Hotel in a city suburb early this week. Police intervened in the meeting that was suspected to be promoting gay activities and questioned the participants who were later released.

The Government would like to state that much as promoting gay activities is illegal according to Section 145 of the Penal code Act, Uganda does not segregate against people of a different sexual orientation.

No government official is bent to harass any section of the community and everybody in Uganda enjoys the freedom to lawfully assemble and associate freely with others.

Cultural attitudes in Africa are very different to elsewhere in the world, 2/3 of African countries outlaw homosexual activity and 80% of East African countries criminalize it. Whilst at a global level more than 80 countries outlaw homosexual acts.

The government would like to encourage all Ugandans to be vigilant and stay away from unlawful activities that would get them in trouble with the law.

Rev.Fr. Simon Lokodo
Minister of Ethics and Integrity

Lokodo continues to sign himself as “Rev. Fr.” even though he was defrocked by the Vatican last year. So already you know something of the veracity of the man’s statements. But look at what he says in the second paragraph. He references Section 145 of the Uganda penal code and claims that it makes LGBT advocacy illegal. But this is what the code actually says:

Section 145
Unnatural offences

Any person who
(a) has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature;
(b) has carnal knowledge of an animal; or
(c) permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature, commits an offence and is liable to imprisonment for life.

As far as I know, no one was having any sort of carnal knowledge at the conference that Lokodo broke up earlier this week. Everyone I saw in the news reports were fully clothed. What’s more, when he appeared on Ugandan television to talk about the raid, he used Section 145 to justify his actions then. His predecessor used the same justification to cancel the screening of a documentary that included LGBT human rights workers in 2010. This latest statement posted on the Ugandan Media Centre’s web site merely repeats what Lokodo said on Monday when he took credit for the raid. And not only did he use Section 145 to justify the raid, he closes this statement with a warning to ” stay away from unlawful activities that would get them in trouble with the law” — or at least his strange reading of Section 145 of that law. The Associated Press’s report has woefully misread Lokodo’s statement.

But it does appear that Lokodo has become an embarrassment for the Ugandan government. Whenver we see confusion being sown like this, it often comes during times of heightened international scrutiny. The AP claims to have spoken with an un-named official who says that Lokodo was told to tone things down. If so, then this confusing and contradictory statement appears to be the product of that order. Its appearance on the official Ugandan Media Centre web site, which is an official press clearing house for the Ugandan government, suggests that the government is feeling the pressure. But it also can be read as trying to ease the pressure without committing to any changes in policy.

As for the second point the Associated Press got wrong:

Ugandan LGBT Activist Vows to Defy Ban

UK’s The Guardian has some additional information about the Ugandan government’s announcement that they will ban 38 non-governmental organizations which include LGBT issues among their human rights concerns. Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, sees this move as being part of a much wider deterioration of human rights guarantees in Uganda:

Frank Mugisha, head of the NGO Sexual Minorities Uganda, said the minister’s ban was part of a wider assault on civil society in Uganda. “The government is trying to use homosexuality to crack down on freedom of expression and freedom of assembly,” he said. “If NGOs are closed down, they will not be able to support human rights.

“Simon Lokodo is very homophobic but it’s coupled with politics. He’s trying to gain popularity and make his name. The president should come out and distance himself from Lokodo.”

Sexual Minorities Uganda would defy any ban, insisted Mugisha, winner of the Robert F Kennedy human rights award last year. “We are definitely continuing our operations and we will still hold conferences. We will continue to ask for the oppressive laws that are being used to intimidate us to be abolished.

“They have said they are going to pass the bill before October. That won’t stop us. We shall continue to fight until all the legislation is cleared and we are free. Things are changing. It cannot be oppression forever.”

Mohammad Ndifuna, the director of Human Rights Network Uganda, another of the organisations to be banned, told Reuters: “We know that they have been all kinds of threats coming towards the [NGO] sector for different reasons.”

US State Dept Voices “Deep Concerns” About Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill

U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland addressed concerns over reports yesterday that Uganda was once again considering the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. This is what she said at yesterday’s briefing:

QUESTION: Uganda?

MS. NULAND: Yeah.

QUESTION: The anti-homosexuality bill is under consideration again by the parliament. What’s – we’ve talked about this before. What steps is the Administration taking to try to dissuade them from this?

MS. NULAND: Well, we’ve obviously had this on our agenda with Uganda ever since this issue first came up, not only with the government but obviously with members of the legislature. And we will continue to raise our deep concerns about this.

As you know, the Ugandan Government has taken some recent steps to make clear that they are not supportive of some of these moves that are going forward. So in particular, their own human rights commission in 2010, in their annual report, they determined that the anti-homosexuality bill violated Uganda’s own constitution and international law. Other members of the Ugandan civil society have also been speaking out, and we’ve obviously been supportive of those efforts.

So we are very concerned about this. We are resolutely opposed to the bill. We think it’s inconsistent with Uganda’s international human rights obligations, and this just sets a bad, bad precedent in the neighborhood. So we’ll continue to make those points clear, and we’ll make them clear to the individuals who are having to take this vote in the parliament.

Uganda to Ban 38 NGOs Over Gay Rights

Uganda is turning a very dark corner if this Reuters article is correct:

Uganda said on Wednesday it was banning 38 non-governmental organizations it accuses of promoting homosexuality and recruiting children.

…Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo told Reuters the organizations being targeted were receiving support from abroad for Uganda’s homosexuals and accused gays and lesbians of “recruiting” young children in the country into homosexuality.

“The NGOs are channels through which monies are channeled to (homosexuals) to recruit,” the minister, a former Catholic priest, said. He did not name which organizations were on the list.

…”I have got a record of meetings that they have held to empower, enhance and recruit (homosexuals),” Lokodo said.

Lokodo has personally led a raid on an LGBT rights workshop in Entebbe last February, and he raided another one on Monday. Ironically, the topic of Monday’s workshop was on monitoring human rights violations.

Meanwhile, Uganda’s MP David Bahati, who currently holds the position of caucus chair for the ruling National Resistance Movement in Parliament, said yesterday that he expects Parliament to begin debate on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill sometime during its next session, which begins next week. Despite persistent reports to the contrary, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill still includes the death penalty.

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill would also ban all advocacy by or on behalf of gay people, whether that advocacy takes place individually or as part of organizations. Even though the Anti-Homosexuality Bill is not law in Uganda, Lokodo is behaving as though Clause 13 was already law.  Uganda now has made it a matter of governmental policy to deny its citizens the rights of association, assembly and speech. You can now also add the disregard for the rule of law to the wholesale violations Lokodo is committing:

Mohammad Ndifuna, the director of Human Rights Network Uganda, one of the organizations to be banned, said the minister’s threat was part of a larger attack on civil society in Uganda.

“We know that they have been all kinds of threats coming towards the (NGO) sector for different reasons,” said Ndifuna.

Ugandan Parliament Leader Says Anti-Homosexuality Bill Will Be Taken Up In Next Session

That is the lede that was deeply buried in this report from Uganda’s NTV:

Towards the end of this clip, MP David Bahati, the sponsor of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, told NTV’s reporter:

The current legal regime in the penal code act is so weak, that’s why we brought in the bill to strengthen it. [edit] And we have been assured by Hon. Tashobya that he is going to work on this bill this time in session.

Bahati is the caucus leader of the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement. MP Stephen Tashobya is chairman of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, which is responsible for rewind and recommending changes to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

The NTV report errs in saying that the bill would provide a lifetime sentence for LGBT people. It would, as that is one of the penalties spelled out in the bill. But that implies that the death penalty has been removed from the bill. That is not true. The last time the bill went through Tashobya’s committee in 2011, his committee recommended removing the explicit language of “suffer(ing) death,” and replacing it with a reference to the penalties provided in an unrelated existing law — which just happens to specify the death penalty. Which means that the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee recommended that the death penalty be retained through stealth. Bahati then went on to claim that the death penalty was removed even though it was still a part of the bill. The Eighth Parliament ended last year before it could act on the committee’s recommendation. After the Ninth Parliament convened, the original language of the bill, including its death penalty, was reintroduced and referred back to Tashobya’s committee.

The occasion for this news report was yesterday’s raid on a workshop at Esella Country Hotel in the Kampala suburb of Najjeera. The workshop yesterday was intended to provide training in monitoring human rights violations to Ugandan LGBT advocates, who instead saw their own freedoms of assembly, association and speech violated by the raid from Ugandan police. The head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Kampala’s police says that his investigation into whether any laws were broken is ongoing. The CID is routinely called upon to handle politically repressive actions on behalf of the government.

According to Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, “At least five staff of the project were detained alongside 12 of the workshop participants while others escaped after being tipped off about the police raid.” The paper also reports that participants came in from Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and quotes Michelle Kagari, the Amnesty deputy director for Africa, denouncing the raid as a “senseless and ludicrous harassment of rights activists which has no basis in law” She also said it was part of a larger pattern of intimidation of legitimate human rights work. (Daily Monitor and NTV are owned by the same media company based in neighboring Kenya.)

Ethics and Integrity Minister Fr. Simon Lokodo, a defrocked Catholic priest, also led a raid of a gay rights conference in Entebbe in February. He appears to be behind this raid as well, having tipped off NTV that the raid would take place several ours before police arived. Lokodo in this report said that that he will make sure that “all is done to bring them to book” (to be charged with a crime). He also reiterated that “everybody else will know that at least in Uganda we have no room here for homosexuals and lesbians.” He also denounced international pressure on Uganda to respect the human rights of all its citizens, including LGBT citizens, saying that Ugandans “would rather die poor than loose our dignity as Ugandans.”

Uganda Police Raid Gay Rights Meeting

From Uganda’s NTV:

AFP is reporting that Ugandan police on Monday raided a gay rights workshop in Kampala sponsored by the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project. Human rights advocates from Canada, Kenya and Rwanda were questioned. Police also reportedly forced themselves into some of the activists’ hotel rooms:

“This ludicrous and senseless harassment of human rights activists has no basis in law whatsoever and has to stop,” Michelle Kagari, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Africa, said in a statement.

“We are seeing a worrying pattern emerging whereby the Ugandan authorities engage in arbitrary activities deliberately designed to intimidate and threaten legitimate human rights work,” Kagari said.

The NTV report says that they were tipped by the Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo about the raid at the Esella Country Hotel in the Kampala suburb of Najjeera. But reporters apparently arrived a couple of hours before the police. Pepe Julian Onziema of Sexual Minorities Uganda spoke to reporters and reminded them of another raid of a human rights workshop in Entebbe last February. No one was arrested at that raid. This time, NTV reports that four were detained, but were released after their lawyers showed up at the hotel.

Ironically, the workshop’s topic was on methods for monitoring human rights violations.

Ugandan Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox Bishops Call for Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s Revival

Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, reported this worrisome call on Sunday:

Top religious leaders from across the country have asked Parliament to speed-up the process of enacting the Anti-Homosexuality law to prevent what they called “an attack on the Bible and the institution of marriage”.

Speaking after their recent annual conference organised by the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC), an ecumenical body which brings together the Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox churches, the bishops resolved that the parliamentary committee on Gender should be tasked to engage the House on the Bill which is now at committee level.

“We also ask the Education committee to engage the Ministry of Education on the issue of incorporating a topic on human sexuality in the curricula of our schools and institutions of learning,” the resolutions signed by archbishops Henry Luke Orombi, Cyprian Kizito Lwanga and Metropolitan Jonah Lwanga, indicated.

This is a worrying development. Roman Catholic Archbishop Lwanga’s Christmas message of 2009 included his opposition to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. He reiterated that message the following January. He was also a signatory to a multi-faith letter in 2010 which criticized the bill. More than a year later, we learned that prior to the Archbishop’s statements, the Vatican had intervened with its opposition to the bill. This statement now appears to be an about-face on the part of Lwanga.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s sponsor, M.P. David Bahati, continues to lie about the bill’s provisions:

Among some of the propositions in the Bill was one of death and life sentence for those for those caught engaging in homosexuality for a second time.

However, Mr Bahati said these penalties had since been removed from the Bill.

This is as untrue now as it has been every time Bahati has repeated this lie since the bill’s first introduction in 2009. It was referred to the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, where it languished until 2011. When the committee finally reported the bill back onto the House floor in May, 2011 they suggested removing some clauses of the bill while adding of a new clause criminalizing the conduct of same-sex marriages. As for the death penalty provision, the committee recommended a sly change to the bill, removing the explicit language of “suffer(ing) death,” and replacing it with a reference to the penalties provided in an unrelated already existing law. That law however specifies the death penalty. Which means that the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee recommended that the death penalty be retained through stealth. Bahati then went on to claim that the death penalty was removed even though it was still a part of the bill. The Eighth Parliament ended before it could act on the committee’s recommendation.

On February 7, 2012, the original version of the bill, unchanged from when it was first introduced in 2009, was reintroduced into the Ninth Parliament. The bill was again sent to the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee. Despite reports to the contrary, the original language specifying the death penalty is still in the bill, and will remain there unless the committee recommends its actual removal and Parliament adopts that recommendation in a floor vote.

Ugandan TV Covers “American View” of Uganda’s “Battle Lines Over Gay Rights”

NTV, Uganda’s largest independent television station, is broadcasting a series titled American View, which portrays an how Uganda comes across in America. This segment, titled “Battle over Gay Rights” is probably more accurately described as a Ugandan view of the American view of Uganda.

The principal Ugandan spokesperson in this segment is Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo, a defrocked Catholic priest, who raided a gay rights conference in Entebbe in February. In this segment, Lokodo points to a clause in the Ugandan Constitution which bars same-sex marriage and, incredibly, interprets that clause as a blanket ban on all activity related to LGBT advocacy, whether marriage is involved or not.

PBS Reports on Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill

PBS Newhour featured the above segment last night. It doesn’t cover much new ground for regular readers here at BTB (and special kudos to PBS for correctly stating this time that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill still carries the death penalty.) The more interesting story, by far, is this blog post by Fred de Sam Lazaro describing the difficulty of trying to get anyone in the government to go on camera to talk about the bill:

How Uganda’s legislation fares this time around is anyone’s guess. As journalists “parachuting in” to cover it, our recent experience may well serve as a proxy for how the legislation — or homosexuality in general — has become a third rail nobody wants to touch.

The bill’s author, David Bahati, agreed to an interview when finally reached on his cell phone. Perhaps he just wanted to get rid of the call. He neither showed up nor answered the phone after that. The U.S. Embassy declined our request for an interview. We were able to talk to Uganda’s most prominent gay rights activist, Frank Mugisha, but you’ll find no pictures in our report of any social congregation in Uganda’s LGBT community. We were told there are no usual hangouts or clubs any more in a country where the proposed legislation would penalize not just being homosexual but also a failure to report such individuals.

Our fixer was no help. For parachute journalists like my team (producer Nikki See and cameraman Tom Adair), fixers play a critical role. Usually experienced local journalists, fixers use their connections to set up a story before you arrive — pursuing all angles and finding alternatives; a different member of Parliament in place of Bahati, for instance. Unfortunately, we arrived in Uganda to few such arrangements and no back-ups.

Lively Responds to Lawsuit

Scott Lively yesterday responded to the lawsuit filed in Federal District Court by Sexual Minorities Uganda alleging that Lively engaged in a decade-long effort to help plan and encourage the persecution of LGBT people in Uganda in violation of international law. Lively defends his actions as the simple exercise of his freedom of speech, telling The New York Times, “”That’s about as ridiculous as it gets. I’ve never done anything in Uganda except preach the Gospel and speak my opinion about the homosexual issue.” He also told Bob Unruh at World Net Daily:

I am an American citizen [being targeted] over the persecution of homosexuals as they define it as a crime against humanity – for speaking the truth of the Bible in a foreign country,” Scott Lively, of Abiding Truth Ministries, told WND today after he found out about the legal action.

Warren Throckmorton responded to that rather quickly:

Where does the Bible say that homosexuality is responsible for the Holocaust? For the Rwandan genocide? That gays are pedophiles? Are those Biblically based beliefs?

Warren also notes that Exodus International board member Don Scmmierer and International Healing Foundation’s Caleb Lee Brundidge also spoke at that 2009 conference, but neither of them are named in this lawsuit.

Lively also told World Net Daily:

“Frankly, I don’t this is actionable,” Lively told WND. “They make it clear that this suit is … premised on speeches or writings.

“I spoke to members of parliament in their assembly hall, and advised them to focus on therapy and not punishment [for homosexuality],” he said.

“What they’re suggesting here is that the duly elected legislative representatives of Uganda, the cream of Ugandan society, cannot be responsible for their own [legislative] actions – that they adopted legislation because a white evangelical came and said something to them,” he said.

Casting this in racial terms is desperate. The complaint also notes that Lively has traveled to Moldova, Russia and Latvia with similar goals. The measure if his influence in those areas are mixed. Frank Mugisha, Executive Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, notes that there was a clear difference in the atmosphere for LGBT people in Uganda after 2009 when compared to the time before that fateful 2009 conference.

Lively’s strongest argument so far however is his contention that “this suit is … premised on speeches or writing.” The Center for Constitutional Rights senior staff attorney Pam Spees emphasized that the suit is not about his speeches or beliefs, but about a series of planning meetings that took place since 2002 that reached its fruition in the events of 2009. “He was the go-to guy,” she told reporters in a conference call, “the man with the plan.” The challenge in court will be for CCR to provide enough evidence to support their contention of that plan to keep the lawsuit away from being solely about Lively’s speech and beliefs.

While speech alone cannot be the sole basis for this lawsuit (It would, and should, be thrown out immediately if it is), I can envision that Lively’s speeches can be a major part of the evidence presented. Since Lively opened the subject of the Rwandan genocide during his talk in Kampala in 2009, let me return to those events as an example. As the Hutu militias were engaged in a bloodthursty orgy of murder and mayhem in 1994, they were urged on by radio announcers broadcasting anti-Tutsi propaganda, complete with announcements of which Tutu’s live where so that mobs could find them. Were the radio announcers simply exercising free speech? Or were they accomplices in crimes against humanity? International law sides with the latter.

When Lively appeared on Ugandan media, he too broadcast his own virulent brand of anti-gay propaganda, although he didn’t call out people by name and address and urge that they be hunted down. His friends did that instead. Mercifully, Uganda did not slide into genocide, although the proposal before Uganda’s Parliament, if enacted into law, would result in a state-sanctioned outcome that would be remarkably similar. (Lively disavows the proposed death penalty, although he struggled with it a while before finally deciding that it was not something that he would support.) The real question, then, is what specific role did Lively play, in addition to his public talks, which led to the events of 2009? That is CCR’s challenge before the court.

Finally, Lively also had this response for the Associated Press:

“Most of the ostensibly inflammatory comments attributed to me are from selectively edited video clips of my 2009 seminars in Kampala,” he said. “I challenge the plaintiffs and their allies to publish the complete footage of the seminar on the Internet. They will not do this or their duplicity would be exposed.”

It’s my understanding that the Kampala-based Family Life Network, who sponsored the 2009 conference, owns the copyright to the video. While it is legal to publish excerpts of the video under the “fair use” clauses of U.S. copyright law, it would be illegal for anyone who is not the copyright owner to post the entire video. Why hasn’t Stephen Langa’s Family Life Network published the video? Who knows. It’s theirs to do as they wish. But by not publishing it, they leave the door open for Lively to complain about “selectively edited clips.”

Lawsuit Filed Against Scott Lively For Instigating Anti-LGBT Persecution in Uganda

L-R: Unidentified woman, American holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, International Healing Foundation’s Caleb Brundidge, Exodus International boardmember Don Schmierer, Family Life Network (Uganda)’s Stephen Langa, at the time of the March 2009 anti-gay conference in Uganda.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has announced this morning that they are filing a lawsuit on behalf of Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG) against American anti-gay extremist Scott Lively for his role in “the decade-long campaign he has waged, in coordination with his Ugandan counterparts, to persecute persons on the basis of their gender and/or sexual orientation and gender identity.” CCR announced its action this morning in a conference call with reporters. I was among those participating in the call.

The complaint (PDF: 2.2MB/47 pages) was filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts at Springfield, where Lively currently resides. CCR is bringing the suit under the Alien Tort Statute, which provides federal jurisdiction for “any civil action by an alien, for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” In other words, it allows a foreign national to sue in U.S. courts for violations of U.S. or international law conducted by U.S. citizens overseas. According to CCR, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that ATS is a remedy for serious violations of international law norms that are “widely accepted and clearly defined.”

The crime against humanity in international law that CCR alleges that Lively violated is the crime of persecution, which is defined as the “intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity.” CCR alleges that the defendant plaintif, Sexual Minorities Uganda, as well as individual staff members and member organizations, suffered severe deprivations of fundamental rights as a direct result of a coordinated campaign “largely initiated, instigated and directed” by Scott Lively.

In a conference call with reporters, CCR Senior Staff Attorney Pam Spees said that the Alien Tort Statute act had been applied in other specific cases of human rights violations against individuals. But she acknowledged that if this case prevails, it would establish a precedent for applying it to the crime of persecution, which, as a crime against a group, is different from a general “ordering the killing of people in his custody.” She pointed out U.S. asylum cases have acknowledged sexual orientation and gender identity and expression as legitimate claims for persecution.

Lively is best known for his role, reported first here on BTB, as featured speaker at an anti-gay conference held in Kampala in March 2009. During that conference, Lively touted his book, The Pink Swastika, in which he claimed that gays were responsible for founding the Nazi Party and running the gas chambers in the Holocaust. Lively then went on to blame the Rwandan genocide on gay men and he charged that gay people were flooding into Uganda from the West to recruit children into homosexuality via child sexual molestation.

During that same trip, Lively met with several members of Uganda’s Parliament. Only two weeks later, there were already rumors that Parliament was drafting a new law that “will be tough on homosexuals.” That new law, in its final form, would be introduced into Parliament later in October. Meanwhile, the public panic stoked by the March conference led to follow-up meetings, a march on Parliament, and a massive vigilante campaign waged on radio and the tabloid press. Lively would later boast that his March 2009 talk was a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.”

In the complaint filed in Federal District Court, CCR provides details of Lively’s activities in Uganda going back to 2002, when Lively began touring Uganda and establishing contacts with leading Ugandan figures, including Stephen Langa (who organized the March 2009 conference) and Pentecostal pastor Martin Ssempa. While there, he was interviewed for major daily newspapers and appeared on radio and television. In a conference call with reporters, Spees said that Lively’s particular influence on Uganda’s religious leaders was the primary avenue for “telegraphing the sense of terror” through his accusations against the gay community, and that influence picked up significantly following the 2009 conference. The complaint includes several examples where Lively’s rhetoric showed up virtually verbatim in statements from Ugandan religious and political leaders. She also pointed out that the preamble of the bill’s original draft included language that was lifted straight out of conference materials.

Tarso Luís Ramos, Executive Director of Political Research Associates, echoed Spees’s assertion that Lively’s influence played a major role in the growing climate of persecution in Uganda. He described the main avenue of influence as from religious leaders like Lively to prominent Ugandan religious leaders who also wield considerable moral and political influence. Ramons said that during Lively’s 2009 trip to Uganda, he also met with members of the Ugandan Christian Lawyers Association and members of Parliament, and spoke at an assembly of 5,000 college students and at major pentecostal churches. According to the complaint, M.P. David Bahati, author of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, was among those who attended the Kampala conference. Bahati and former Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo were also named as co-conspirators in the complaint.

Ramos and Spees contrasted Lively’s role with that of the secretive U.S. organization known as The Family or The Fellowship. Spees described Lively as the “go-to guy whose rhetoric went into hyperspace to stamp out” LGBT people “in a strategic way.” She alleged that he provided a “tangible, clear plan” in contrast to The Family, which tried to distance itself from the bill. One  part of the “clear plan” outlined in the complaint was Lively’s recommendation for the criminalization of LGBT advocacy in Uganda. That recommendation became Clause 13 in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

Spees emphasized that while Lively’s “violent anti-gay rhetoric” forms a basis for the evidence of the complaint, the case is not about hate speech but what she described as his systematic efforts to provoke persecution in Uganda and elsewhere. She described Lively as a “key player in persecution” in a concerted effort to deprive and remove rights for LGBT Ugandans.

Speaking via telephone form Uganda, SMUG Executive Director Frank Mugisha welcomed the filing. He said that when the March 2009 Kampala conference was announced, they had no idea how far that conference’s influence would go. Before 2009, he described an atmosphere where people were somewhat freer to live in groups as gay people, but after the conference there were demonstrations, meetings, reports of arrests, people being thrown out of their houses and churches, beatings, and severe curbs on freedom of assembly. Just last month, Ugandan authorities raided a meeting by LGBT leaders at a hotel in Entebbe and tried to arrest Kasha Jacqueline Nabagese, founder of the lesbian rights group Freedom and Roam Uganda.

More information about the lawsuit against Lively can be found at the CCR web site.

Update: The New York Times has this reaction from Lively:

Reached by telephone in Springfield, Mass., where he now runs “Holy Grounds Coffee House,” a storefront mission and coffee shop, Mr. Lively said he had not been served and did not know about the lawsuit. However, he said: “That’s about as ridiculous as it gets. I’ve never done anything in Uganda except preach the Gospel and speak my opinion about the homosexual issue. There’s actually no grounds for litigation on this.”

Ugandan Association of Women Lawyers Oppose Anti-Homosexuality Bill

Today’s edition of the Ugandan government-owned New Vision has published a statement from FIDA, the Ugandan Association of Women Lawyers, opposing the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The statement says, in part:

[A]s a human rights organization we strongly oppose the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill. In the first instance, human rights are in-born and belong to all individuals equally without requiring any permission for their enjoyment. Human rights are also not conferred by the State or by any other institution, organization or individual.

In the circumstances, we believe that the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill is unnecessary and redundant. The current Criminal Law — particularly the Penal Code Amendment of 2007 — fully protects all children, whether boys or girls from sexual exploitation by any individual who may abuse his or her position of power or authority. Furthermore, the Penal Code Act already provides for the offences outlined in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Moreover, the Bill contains several clauses that cannot survive the many tests provided by the 1995 Constitution of Uganda. This is because the Bill violates, among others, the rights to equality and non-discrimination, privacy, as well as the freedoms of speech, expression, association and assembly.

Sexual relations between willing and consenting adults is a private affair which the State should not police. Attempting to enforce the proposed Bill would amount to a gross and unjustified intrusion into the lives and privacy of all people in Uganda, for it would require constant surveillance of all bedrooms to ascertain who is having sexual intercourse with whom and how.

The statement’s placement (PDF: 1.7MB/1 page) in the pro-government newspaper is on a page dedicated to news for the country’s significant Muslim minority. It is located under an article in which an Imam at Africa’s largest mosque in Kampala urges Muslim men to avoid the “vice” of homosexuality by taking four wives as allowed by Islam.

PBS Gets It WRONG: Uganda’s Death Penalty Clause Has Not Been Removed

Yet another journalist not getting his facts right in an otherwise good report:

Meanwhile, the anti-homosexuality legislation—with the death penalty clause removed—is working its way through a weeks-long hearing process.

No, no, a million times no!

Let’s go through this one more time!

It’s important to address the persistent false reports in the media that the death penalty has been removed from the bill. Those false reports have been reported as though they were fact since December, 2009. Part of the confusion has stemmed from the Ugandan governments’ pronouncements over the years that the bill has been “rejected”. In April 2010, that so-called “rejection” was followed by a government recommendation that the bill’s provisions be passed under the radar in other, less controversial bills. Additional reports of the government “shelving” the bill emerged in March 2011, only to be followed again a few weeks later with suggestions that the bill be carved up and passed unnoticed in other bills.

Finally in May of 2011, the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, which had been charged with the task of coming up with recommendations for the bill, issued their final report. They recommended removing some clauses of the bill, while also recommending the addition of a new clause criminalizing the conduct of same-sex marriages. As for the death penalty provision, the committee recommended a sly change to the bill, removing the explicit language of “suffer(ing) death,” and replacing it with a reference to the penalties provided in an unrelated already existing law. That law however specifies the death penalty. Which means that the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee recommended that the death penalty be retained through stealth. Bahati then went on to claim that the death penalty was removed even though it was still a part of the bill. The Eighth Parliament ended before it could act on the committee’s recommendation.

On February 7, 2012, the original version of the bill, unchanged from when it was first introduced in 2009, was reintroduced into the Ninth Parliament. The bill was again sent to the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee. Despite reports to the contrary, the original language specifying the death penalty is still in the bill, and will remain there unless the committee recommends its removal and Parliament adopts that recommendation in a floor vote.

We have been following this story closely for exactly three years now, and have covered all of the ins and outs of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill since its introduction in October 2009.  So it’s not as if this information isn’t out there or difficult to find. Maybe someday journalists will get this right, but it doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon.

Uganda Law Society Opposes Anti-Homosexuality Bill

This morning’s Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, reports that the Uganda Law Society has warned that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill would institutionalize discrimination against those “who are, or thought to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.” The law group warned:

“The bill would further purport to criminalise the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality, compel HIV testing in certain circumstances, impose life sentences for entering into a same-sex marriage, introduce the death penalty for ‘aggravated’ homosexuality, as well as punish those who fail to report knowledge of any violations of its provisions within 24 hours,” said the ULS.

…Mr James Mukasa Sebugenyi, the ULS president, said the bill would violate rights to freedom of expression, thought, peaceful assembly, association, liberty and security of the person and privacy among others.

In a statement issued last week, ULS warned:

Generally, the bill would violate the principle of non-discrimination and would lead to violations of the human rights to freedom of expression, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of association, liberty and security of the person, privacy, the highest standard of health, and to life. These rights are guaranteed under the Constitution of Uganda and in international and regional treaties to which Uganda is party, which include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter).

The statement goes on to cite several articles of the Uganda Constitution which the proposed bill would violate.

The Establishment Clauses For The Ugandan Inquisition

The proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009. (Click to download, PDF: 847KB/16 pages)

Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill has been re-introduced into Parliament and is currently in the hands of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee. As the Committee considers what to do with the bill, there has been considerable confusion over what would happen if the bill were to become law. Most of the attention has focused on the bill’s death penalty provision, but even if it were removed, the bill’s other seventeen clauses would still represent a barbaric regression for Uganda’s human rights record. In this series, we will examine the original text of bill’s eighteen clauses to uncover exactly what it includes in its present form.

A couple of the clauses in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill are administrative:

15. Jurisdiction.
Save for aggravated homosexuality that shall be tried by the High Court, the magistrates court shall have jurisdiction to try the other offences under this Act.

19. Regulations.
The Minister may, by statutory instrument, make regulations generally for better carrying out the provisions of this Act.

On first blush, both of these clauses look rather innocuous. Clause 15 sets out which courts will have jurisdiction over which portion of the bill. Uganda’s High Court hears the most serious cases, and Clause 1 gives it sole jurisdiction over “aggravated homosexuality” (Clause 3) which currently carries the death penalty under the proposed bill. Magistrate Courts generally sit below High Court in terms of the severity of criminal cases that they hear. As far as I know, it appears that Clause 15 is probably fairly typical given the kinds of penalties that would be under consideration.

Where Clause 15 is uninteresting, Clause 19 is something entirely alarming. Someone will be tasked to issue further regulations to ensure that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill is enforced. And who is that Minister charged with that task? To find out, you will need to find the definition in Clause 1:

“Minister'” means the Minister responsible for ethics and integrity;

In the current regime, that would be Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo, a defrocked Catholic priest who last week led a group of armed guards in a raid of a hotel in Entebbe where a LGBT advocacy conference was taking place. He summarily ordered the arrest of LGBT advocate Kasha Jacqueline Nabageser, but Kasha slipped away and was able to avoid Lokodo’s thugs. If Lokodo could break up a meeting with no legal basis whatsoever, imagine the reign of terror he would engineer once he has the Anti-Homosexuality Bill with all of the opportunities for abuse it provides.

Lokodo’s predecessor, James Nsaba Buturo, also saw his office as enforcer-in-chief of Uganda’s particular brand of “ethics and integrity.” And he, like Lokodo, also saw himself as the nation’s pastor, writing lengthy op-eds in Ugandan newspapers intoning on the moral evils he saw plaguing the country. Before President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986 following a civil war, Buturo served in Milton Obote’s bloody regime as an enforcer who was adept at making Obote’s enemies disappear. In Museveni’s government, he wielded a softer touch, but was no less insistent in his goal of making gays disappear. While Buturo has apparently fallen out of favor with the Museveni government, having been forced to resign in early 2011, he set a pattern that Lokodo would emulate. In December 2010, Buturo banned the screening of a documentary film which depicted, in part, the work of LGBT human rights workers.

One senses that should the Anti-Homosexuality Bill becomes law, the Ministry of Ethics and Integrity could very well change its name to the Ugandan Inquisition. And why not? There are many parallels. An early draft of the bill included a paragraph in its accompanying memorandum extolling the virtues of ex-gay therapy. That paragraph was dropped when the bill was introduced into Parliament in 2009, but that didn’t stop the bill’s supporters to trot out a supposedly ex-gay person as a modern-day converso. And the witch-hunts which would be unleashed by Clause 14, the ban on all deviation from the Ugandan Inquisition via Clause 13, the startling ease with which someone could be put to death in Clause 3 with the High Court being put in charge of the auto-da-fé — these are the measures that Tomás de Torquemada himself would appreciate.

Clause By Clause With Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill:
Clauses 1 and 2: Anybody Can Be Gay
Clause 3: Anyone Can Be “Liable To Suffer Death”
Clause 4: Anyone Can “Attempt to Commit Homosexuality”
Clauses 5 and 6: Anyone Can Be A Victim (And Get Out Of Jail Free If You Act Fast)
Clauses 7 and 14: Anyone Can “Aid And Abet”
Clauses 8 to 10: A Handy Menu For “Victims” To Choose From
Clauses 11, 14, 16 and 17: Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide
Clause 12: Till Life Imprisonment Do You Part
Clause 13: The Silencing of the Lambs
Clause 14: The Requirement Isn’t Only To Report Gay People To Police. It’s To Report Everyone.
Clauses 15 and 19: The Establishment Clauses For The Ugandan Inquisition