Anti-gay law does not violate human rights, Uganda claims

What you need to know:

  • Law seeks to protect children from those engaged in acts of recruiting them into homosexuality
  • homosexuals are prevented from publicly exhibiting their sexuality and sexual acts

Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act is intended to protect the country's children and poor and does not violate human rights, a Ugandan diplomat declared at a United Nations forum on Thursday.

The controversial law signed recently by President Yoweri Museveni “seeks to protect our children from those engaged in acts of recruiting them and disorienting their minds into homosexuality and lesbianism,” Ambassador Christopher Onyanga Aparr told the UN Human Rights Council.

It is also the intention of the law to prevent the use of “financial inducements to entice socially disadvantaged and vulnerable, innocent poor people into homosexuality,” Ambassador Onyanga Aparr added.

He said Uganda has likewise moved to prevent homosexuals from publicly exhibiting their sexuality and sexual acts or practices to appear as superior to those who practice normal sex.

The envoy was responding at the Human Rights Council to what he termed as misleading concerns about the Anti-Homosexuality Act that had been raised earlier in the session by the United States, Belgium and Sweden.

More than 80 countries, including some states even in America itself, have adopted laws aimed at repressing homosexuality, Ambassador Aparr said.

“Uganda's law is not intended to discriminate, persecute or punish homosexuals by the sheer fact of their sexual disorientation,” he asserted. Instead, the act is aimed at “protecting and defending

Ugandan society from social disorientation.”

“Sexual disorientation is not a fundamental human right,” the envoy said.

The United States and some European countries have condemned the Anti-Homosexuality Law as an affront to human rights standards.

US Secretary of State John Kerry recently compared the Ugandan law to anti-Jewish measures taken by Nazi Germany and to racist legislation adopted by South Africa's apartheid government.

"You could change the focus of this legislation to black or... Jewish, and you could be in 1930s Germany or you could be in 1950s, '60s apartheid South Africa," Secretary Kerry said.