Uganda has resurrected its “Kill the Gays” bill, which imposes the death penalty for homosexual acts and makes it illegal to advocate for LGBTQ+ people.
Gay sex is already criminalized in the country. It currently carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison. But Ugandan Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo says these laws are not tough enough, CNN reports.
“Homosexuality is not natural to Ugandans, but there has been a massive recruitment by gay people in schools, and especially among the youth, where they are promoting the falsehood that people are born like that,” Lokodo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Our current penal law is limited. It only criminalizes the act. We want it made clear that anyone who is even involved in promotion and recruitment has to be criminalized. Those that do grave acts will be given the death sentence.”
Uganda’s constitutional court previously overturned the same bill in 2014. International pressure and local activism both played a part in resisting the bill.
“The bill was meant to make us go underground, but instead the community organized to fight,” Clare Byarugaba, an LGBTQ activist with the human rights organization Chapter Four, explained to CNN.
Byarugaba says the community plans to work just as hard this time around.
Though the bill hasn’t yet been passed into law, merely re-introducing it could lead to an increase in anti-LGBTQ violence, as it did in 2014. Hundreds of LGBTQ+ people have been forced to leave Uganda as refugees.
