Two Ugandans Are About To Become The First People Ever Tried Under The Country’s Anti-LGBT Laws

[DonViejo]

The two individuals, whose trial was scheduled to begin today, would be the first Ugandans ever to be tried for same-sex intercourse.

J. Lester Feder
BuzzFeed Staff

If a trial that was due to start today in Uganda had proceeded on schedule, it would have been the first time Ugandans had been tried for homosexuality.

That’s not just under the country’s new Anti-Homosexuality Act — that’s in all of Uganda’s modern history, according to Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum (HRAPF), the group organizing the defense of the two facing charges. Uganda has had a law on the books criminalizing “unnatural offenses” defined as “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature” since 1890, when it was a colony of Great Britain. Even under that law, no LGBT people went on trial in Uganda’s modern history.

The trial of 24-year-old Kim Mukisa and 19-year-old Jackson Mukasa was pushed back Wednesday to June 12, HRAPF Executive Director Adrian Jjuuko told BuzzFeed, because witnesses for the prosecution were not in court. Instead, the two were finally able to secure bail after having been held since their arrest in late January, a month before the Anti-Homosexuality Act became law.

Because they were arrested before the new law — which criminalizes even the “intent to commit homosexuality” and also makes it a crime to promote LGBT rights — went into effect, the two are being tried under the colonial-era unnatural offenses provision. But the trial is significant, Jjuuko said in a phone interview from Kampala, because it marks a turning point in how Uganda’s laws against homosexuality are used against LGBT people. Before, sodomy cases didn’t wind up in court, he said, because police primarily used charges to extort bribes or blackmail people believed to be LGBT.

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http://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/two-ugandans-are-about-to-become-the-first-people-ever-tried

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