Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for the opportunity to testify today on the situation of the LGBTI community in Uganda. I thank you for your continued attention to this matter. I thank the people of Canada for their support to the Ugandan LGBTI community and movement.
I have been providing legal representation for the LGBTI community in Uganda for well over a decade and a half. As a founder and former executive director of Chapter Four Uganda, a civil rights organization, I have been working closely with the LGBTI community. I was the lead lawyer, in 2014, in the successful challenge to the country's anti-gay legislation. I am now part of the legal team that is challenging the current 2023 anti-gay law in the Ugandan Supreme Court.
Since the enactment of the Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda, contrary to popular expectation, there has not been a large number of court prosecutions of LGBTI individuals in the country. The Government of Uganda has issued non-binding circulars to limit court prosecutions of individuals under the law. For instance, the director of public prosecutions issued a circular, in August 2023, titled “Management of cases with charges preferred under the Anti-Homosexuality Act”. This circular required all files regarding LGBTI individuals to be submitted to the DPP's headquarters and to undertake an organized sensitization training for prosecutors on how to handle cases of LGBTI individuals. The Ministry of Health issued a circular as well, on August 8, 2023, emphasizing the provision and access to health services for all people, without discrimination. The Attorney General also reversed an earlier circular, by the National Council for Science and Technology, that required researchers to disclose the identity of their research subjects, and their sexual orientation and gender identity.
These circulars are not laws. They cannot and do not replace the laws enacted by Parliament. The possibility of enforcement of the LGBTI law in Uganda remains an ever-present threat to the LGBTI community, a real possibility hanging over their heads, creating an unsettling uncertainty. The steps mentioned above were taken, in large part, due to the sustained pressure and condemnation of Uganda by the international community, the challenge to the laws in court and the robust advocacy of the community and their allies against the law.
However, police and state agencies-sanctioned arrests and intimidation continue to be pervasive. These arrests do not end up in court prosecutions, but they often involve prolonged detentions in police cells, extortion, intimidation and, in many cases, public outing of individuals. Many individuals who are arrested are subjected to forced non-consensual anal exams, which include insertion of objects into their anal cavities, often in the presence of several individuals. The results of these unlawful examinations are then made public. The practice has no legal basis and, as such, any evidence obtained is inadmissible in a court of law for being obtained by means of torture. Such evidence is incapable of proving anything. They are without any basis in science. The sole objective is to dehumanize LGBTI individuals and to degrade them in society.
Mr. Chair and members of the committee, the most debilitating and perhaps the most tragic form of persecution of LGBTI individuals in Uganda may not be in a court of law but in the social terror unleashed on LGBTI individuals as a result of the enactment of this law. These are often unreported. They happen in private spaces, but do so in a drip-drip fashion. They are the lived experiences of individuals who express themselves in many ways, first within families and close relatives, then within wider societies. Documentation of such abuse since the law has passed has shown increased cases of homelessness due to family expulsion, due to expulsion from their own communities by people in the community, due to denial of rental property and evictions by landlords for those who already have houses.
Yet the world has moved on and attention to the situation in Uganda has waned.