Delgado, too, being in the public spotlight was a decision they made reluctantly. “It’s about making a contribution, even a small one, to the rights of LGBT people here in Namibia.”įor Mr.
Only when that too was rejected, he says, did he begin to see the barriers against them as discriminatory, and decided to challenge the non-recognition of their marriage in court.Īs activists rallied around their case, “we realized then how much bigger this is than just us,” he says. So the couple followed the government’s recommendation that Mr. “ said no, that they didn’t want to open Pandora’s box” by recognizing a foreign same-sex marriage, he recalls. Digashu says, since they were family members of a Namibian citizen. Initially, they thought they were eligible for permanent residency, Mr. Digashu and their son to stay legally in Namibia. Potgieter, the couple wasn’t thinking about the historical origins of Namibia’s laws. Digashu, who is South African, arrived in Namibia in 2016, with his husband, Mr. “These laws are not our laws – they were not written by a democratically elected Namibian government,” says Omar van Reenen, co-founder of the Namibia Equal Rights Movement, a coalition of organizations advocating for LGBTQ rights. When it became independent, it wrote a new constitution, but it also inherited many of South Africa’s restrictive laws, including the criminalization of sodomy.Ī government body was soon set up to reform those old laws, but three decades later, many, including several restricting the rights of LGBTQ Namibians, remain on the books. Until 1990, the country of 2.5 million was ruled by apartheid South Africa. Namibia is wrestling with a particularly complicated history when it comes to its laws. But they often find it difficult to do the right thing because they don’t want to be voted out.” “Governments know and legislatures know that they are not supposed to govern solely based on what’s popular. “Courts are often the ultimate guarantor of human rights when a particular right or type of rights is not popular,” says Neela Ghoshal, an associate director in the LGBT Rights program at Human Rights Watch. Russia says it’s fighting Nazis in Ukraine. The cases in Namibia are not challenging the criminalization of homosexuality directly, but activists hope that by chipping away at legal prohibitions, they could set the precedent for more wide-reaching challenges in the future. Three cases challenging the criminalization of gay sex are currently being tried in Mauritius, an island nation in southeastern Africa. In 2018, India’s Supreme Court overturned a British colonial law banning sex “against the order of nature.” Botswana followed the next year. Those court challenges are, in many ways, a battleground of last resort, leapfrogging legislatures and public opinion to secure legal rights. “There’s only so much people can take before they fight back and right now they’re fighting back through the courts,” says Uno Katjipuka, an attorney for the Lühl-Delgados, who also recently worked on a police brutality case whose victim was a transgender woman. In recent years, similar laws have begun to topple across the region, and activists hope Namibia’s may be next. The cases being challenged may seem narrow, but their significance is not.īut as both families’ cases wind their way through the courts, they have drawn renewed focus to laws that discriminate against LGBTQ people in Namibia. Laws that criminalize homosexuality are common across Africa.
0 kommentar(er)
