Tag: anti-homosexuality bill 2009

Petition delivered to Uganda’s Parliament; Ssempa miffed

Avaaz.org is hosting a petition opposing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The first installment of signatures was delivered earlier today to the Speaker of the Parliament, Edward Sekandi. From Afrik.com:

The anti-gay bill was tabled in parliament by member of parliament David Bahati in October 2009. Since then a lot has been debated about the harshness of punishments in the bill.

The petition was today morning presented to the speaker of Uganda parliament Edward Sekandi by four people who said were representing Aids service providers, human rights activists, spiritual mentors and councilors.

Rev. Canon Gideon Byamugisha, the first Anglican church priest in Uganda to declare that he was living with HIV-AIDs in late 1980, led the group that presented the bill to the speaker in parliament.

Byamigisha told the press in Kampala that the speaker welcomed their petition and promised to send it to the committee working on the bill. He said that Sekandi told them that it is now too late to withdraw the bill because it is already in the hands of parliamentarians.
You can find the petition here. Normally I do not sign online petitions but this one has some connection in the real world via Rev. Byamugisha. I think this with the Facebook groups (over 100,000 members of the various groups) might give some sense of the magnitude of the hope for a reconsideration among Uganda’s key leaders.
UPDATE: Martin Ssempa is not happy with the petition, calling Byamugisha one of the “imperialistic agents of sodomy.” Ssempa want the petitioners thrown out of Parliament and sent to some camp for a little reeducation.  

Martin Ssempa defends gay porn presentations

The following news release is Martin Ssempa’s attempt to justify his recent pornography presentations in Uganda (here and here). I received this from Rev. Ssempa’s supporting church, Canyon Ridge Christian Church in Las Vegas. Canyon Ridge supports the Ssempas as missionaries to Uganda.

On Screening Gay Porn1

You can also view this statement here.

Rev. Ssempa is either unaware or unconcerned that heterosexual people also engage in the practices he is displaying to his audiences. By his logic here, one should seek an Anti-Heterosexuality Bill as well.

It is hard to understand why Hon. Bahati and Rev. Ssempa continue to say that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill only relates to “paedophiles and those who raped the handicapped.” A reading of the bill reveals otherwise.

Ssempa’s “million man march” halted – UPDATED

UPDATE: A “hundreds person march” was held in Jinza. Video is at the end of the post and the Daily Monitor has an article about it.

It may be temporary but the Uganda version of the “million man march” on Kampala may be off. The Daily Monitor reports:

On Sunday, Police moved to halt a planned demonstration in support of the controversial Anti-Homosexuality Bill saying that the government is still sorting ‘issues out’ as pro-gay activists under the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kampala secretly met to condemn the same bill.

“It is true Gen. Kayihura sent us a text message that he hasn’t cleared the demonstration. He said we should meet him on Tuesday to forge a way forward,” Pastor Ssempa said.

Pastor Martin Ssempa, one of the organisers of the demonstration confirmed that the Inspector of Police Major General Kale kayihura had contacted them and proposed a meeting on Tuesday before the Wednesday demo.

Meanwhile a Tulsa, OK MCC pastor was in Kampala to support those targeted by the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Kampala, one of the few religious organizations in Uganda that is supporting the gay community held a conference on Sunday to ‘highlight the need for an end to discriminatory treatment of the gay population in uganda.
According their website, Reverend Marlin Lavanhar, President of Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry and senior minister at All Souls Unitarian Church, arrived in Uganda on Thursday last week to launch a campaign against the Bill.
Be careful, pastor, you might get an advanced taste of the AHB:
However, Gen. Kayihura said he was not aware of the meeting and vowed to arrest them. “I am not aware of this meeting. But if we get them, we shall arrest them,” he said.
UPDATED: He moved it to Jinja, another large city about 100 km from Kampala.

Bahati says law is silent about defilement of boys; 2007 law says otherwise

There seems to be confusion among Uganda parliamentarians about what their law says regarding defilement of children.

Speaking about the perceived need for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, David Bahati is quoted in the Independent as saying the following:

Trying to justify the necessity of passing the bill into law he added, “In the Defilement Act 2009, the law says that if someone (man) defiles a minor (girl child), the maximum punishment is death, but if a man defiles a boy, the law is silent about it.”

I can find no mention of a “Defilement Act 2009” on the website of the Ugandan Parliament or in any news reports. However, note this 2007 report of a bill passed in Uganda which covers boys and girls.

KAMPALA, 19 April 2007 (PlusNews) – According to a new law passed by Uganda’s parliament on Wednesday, an HIV-positive person who wilfully infects a minor through sexual intercourse will face the death penalty.

According to the new Penal Code Amendment Bill, an individual who is aware of their HIV-positive status and has sex with a child under the age of 14, with or without their consent, is guilty of “aggravated defilement” and, on conviction in the High Court, “liable to suffer death”. The crime of defilement is defined as sex with a person under the age of 14.

Parliament unanimously passed the bill, first tabled in August 2006, but parliamentary spokeswoman Helen Kawesa said it needed presidential assent to become law, which usually takes about 30 days.

The proposed legislation seeks to amend the existing penal code, which has been criticised for being too lenient with HIV-positive people who rape children. Capital punishment has been the penalty for anyone found guilty of rape or defilement since 1996, but has never been implemented.

This article seems to be referring to the passage of the same law referred to here in these April 18 minutes of the Ugandan Parliament.

THE MINISTER OF STATE, JUSTICE (Mr Fred Ruhindi): Madam Speaker, I beg to move that the Bill entitled the Penal Code (Amendment) Bill, 2007 be read for the third time and do pass.

(Question put and agreed to.)

A Bill for an Act entitled “The Penal Code (Amendment) Act, 2007”

There is a lengthy discussion of the bill which references a Parliament committee report making clear that the bill refers to both boys and girls.

2.     Defilement: 

a)   The proposed amendment on section 129 defines a sexual act to involve the offence on either a male and a female child.  The offence of defilement is a felony and an offence punishable by life imprisonment and therefore triable and bailable by Chief Magistrate. 

The amendment intends to punish persons for sexual acts committed against all children – both male and female.

Indeed, as far as I can tell from the Parliament’s minutes, the amendments remained intact and the law covers both male and female children.

To those in the know in Uganda: Which is it? We have been hearing for months from proponents of the bill that the boy child was not covered but this law passed by Parliament appears to include both males and females. The 2007 law is on the books and should be quite sufficient, if I read it corrently, to cover any defilement of minors.

UPDATE: In this document published by the Refugee Law Project, I located the text of the Penal Code Amendment Act.

THE PENAL CODE (AMENDMENT) ACT, 2006 (2007)

An Act to amend the Penal Code Act 

BE IT ENACTED by Parliament as follows:

1. Abolition of corporal punishment

(1) Corporal punishment is abolished and accordingly, all references to corporal punishment in the Penal Code Act in this Act referred to as the principal Act, are repealed.

(2) Without prejudice to the general effect of subsection (1) of this section, Section 125, subsection (2) of section 129 and section 205 of the Penal Code Act, are amended by the repeal of the words “with or without corporal punishment”.

2. Section 129 of the Penal Code Act replaced

The principal Act is amended by substituting for section 129 the following new sections—

“Defilement of persons under eighteen years of age

129. (1) Any person who performs a sexual act with another person who is below the age of eighteen years, commits a felony known as defilement and is on conviction liable to life imprisonment.

(2) Any person who attempts to perform a sexual act with another person who is below the age of eighteen years commits an offence and is on conviction, liable to imprisonment not exceeding eighteen years.

(3) Any person who attempts to perform a sexual act with another person who is below the age of eighteen years in any of the circumstances specified in subsection (4) commits a felony called aggravated defilement and is, on conviction by the High Court, liable to suffer death.

(4) The circumstances referred to in subsection (3) are as follows—

(a) where the person against whom the offence is committed is below the age of fourteen years;

(b) where the offender to his or her knowledge, is infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome(AIDS);

(c) where the offender is a parent or guardian of or a person in authority over, the person against whom the offence is committed; or

(d) where the offender is a serial offender.

(5) Any person who attempts to perform a sexual act with another person below the age of eighteen years in any of the circumstances specified in subsection (4), commits an offence and is liable on conviction, to imprisonment for life.

(6) In this section unless the context otherwise requires—

“serial offender” means a person who has a previous conviction for the offence of defilement or aggravated defilement;

“sexual act” means penetration of the vagina, mouth, or anus, however slight, of any person by a sexual organ or the use of any object or organ by a person on another person’s sexual organ

“sexual organ” includes a vagina or penis.

Makerere University Law School Dean, Sylvia Tamale, refers to these amendments in this analysis of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

Sexual crimes against children are already criminalised under Ugandan law. Section 129 of the Ugandan penal code provides that ‘any person who performs a sexual act with another person who is below the age of 18 years, commits a felony known as defilement and is on conviction liable to life imprisonment.’24 This section also provides for the offence of ‘aggravated defilement’ punishable by death.[25]

Existing provisions on ‘defilement’ and ‘aggravated defilement’ under the penal code do not differentiate between same-sex and heterosexual sexual abuse. Hence it is not clear what the proposed offence of ‘aggravated homosexuality’ under the Anti-Homosexuality bill aims to achieve.

Not clear, indeed. When David Bahati and Martin Ssempa says that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill aims to extend existing protections to the “boy child,” I can only assume that they are unaware of the Penal Code Amendment Act of 2007. The stated reason for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill disappears when one examines the current law.

More on this:

Other sources refer to The Penal Code Amendment Act of 2007 as being a part of an overall effort to prosecute the growing problem of child sexual molestation in Uganda, the majority of it being girls molested by men. On Page 8 of this United Nations report on violence against women, the Ugandan Section 129 is reproduced as I have it above. And then in this July, 2008 report filed by the Ugandan chapter of the African Network for Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), the Penal Code Amendment Bill is referred to.

Thus in 2007, Parliament passed the Penal Code Amendment Bill and the Magistrates Courts Amendments Bill…The new amendments took effect two months ago and the judiciary is currently transferring case files from the high court to the magistrates’ courts.

Thus, according to this source, the Penal Code Amendment Act took effect at least by the Spring of 2008. I suspect it was in force earlier as indicated by this August 1, 2007 statement by Uganda’s Deputy Attorney General Fred Ruhindi (“recently we passed the Penal Code (Amendment) Bill. I believe that by now that Bill may already be assented to.”), although awareness of the law might not have been great. Thus, complaints that current Ugandan law does not cover abuser of “the boy child” seem to be incorrect.

Jan Mickelson Show WHO on at 11:00am

I will be on the Jan Mickelson Show WHO Des Moines at 11:00am (est). We will be discussing Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009. You can listen live here. If that doesn’t work, go to Mickelson’s website and click the Listen Live link.