What you need to know:
- First Lady Janet Museveni proposed the law incorporate comprehensive rehabilitation provisions, to cater to those who want to stop practicing homosexuality.
The government has agreed to retain the death penalty in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2023, while clauses on the duty to report acts of homosexuality will be dropped.
First Lady Janet Museveni proposed the law incorporate comprehensive rehabilitation provisions, to cater to those who want to stop practicing homosexuality.
These, among other changes, were arrived at after a closed-door caucus meeting between President Museveni and members of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) on Thursday.
They will be effected when President Museveni returns the Bill to Parliament for reconsideration.
With a harmonised position by majority NRM legislators, chances are high that the proposals will sail through.
The Bill passed last month introduces tough penalties in fines and prison sentences (up to 20 years) for offences, including same-sex activities, aggravated homosexuality, promoting homosexuality, child grooming, among others.
Ms Museveni said the law in its current form leans more to prevention and less on correction of those who are already practicing homosexuality.
“If we put a law that criminalises all these other things they do in our society but—for those who want to change—provide a formula through which they can change to become normal again, I think our law will be complete,” she said.
In its current form, it is at the discretion of the court to order the provision of social services for purposes of rehabilitation upon conviction.
The retention of the death penalty is a shift from an earlier opinion by the Attorney General that frowned upon the death penalty for convicts of aggravated homosexuality as provided for in Clause 3(1) of the Bill offends provisions of the constitution.
In a telephone interview with Sunday Monitor on Friday, Mr Jackson Kafuuzi—the Deputy Attorney General—said they had ruled out any unconstitutionality upon further scrutiny of the wording in the provision.
“We were saying it makes the death penalty mandatory, but when you look at the wording of the Bill, it says it is ‘liable to suffer death’. Courts have interpreted this to mean the judge or presiding officer has the discretion to decide whether it should be death or not,” Mr Kafuuzi said
He added: “If it had said ‘shall suffer death’, that would take away the discretion of the presiding officer.”
Aggravated homosexuality is defined in the enacted Act as the offence of homosexuality where the victim is below 14 years or above 75, a person living with disability or mental illness, or where a person contracts an illness with no scientific cure, or the offender is a parent, guardian or a serial offender.
The government also decided to drop clauses criminalising failure to report acts of homosexuality on grounds of ambiguity. The offence would attract a fine of 5,000 currency points (Shs100m) or imprisonment for six months.
“The only one we have agreed to remove is Clause 14 because if we maintain it, it will create an ambiguity and give room for the matter to be challenged. We want to have an airtight law and avoid what befell the first law,” Mr Kafuuzi said.
In the parliamentary sitting of April 18, Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa said: “If there is any other issue, we are ready to still do our part even in a tougher way, in terms of having a stronger Bill than the one we have.”
Speaking after the caucus meeting, NRM Chief Whip Hamson Obua said President Museveni was in agreement with majority of the provisions, adding that he had agreed to assent when the proposed changes are effected.
President Museveni has remained defiant in the face of global backlash pushing him to veto the law.
Key partners and donors, including the European Union (EU), have red-flagged the law as regressive and discriminatory, opening the possibility of sanctions. The European Parliament’s resolution of April 20 “condemn[ed], in the strongest possible terms, [Uganda’s anti-gay Bill]” and singled out President Museveni’s “hateful rhetoric about LGBTIQ persons.”
The European Parliament also warned that if the Bill is signed into law, it will be left with little choice but to push for the “triggering [of] the EU global human rights sanctions regime.”