The bill further states that anybody who ?attempts to commit the offence? is liable to imprisonment for seven years.

?The same applies to anybody who ?aids, abets, counsels or procures another to engage in acts of homosexuality? or anybody who keeps a house or room for the purpose of homosexuality.

The bill also proposes stiff sentences for people promoting homosexuality.

They risk a fine of sh100m(50,000 dollars) or prison sentences of five to seven years. A person charged with the offense will also have to undergo a mandatory medical examination to ascertain his or her HIV status.

http://newvision.co.ug/D/8/12/697859697859

It becomes obviously wrong only when we conceive of intervention in military terms. I would hardly argue for that. Military intervention is precisely the kind of coercive, destructive, trust-destroying “engagement” that most liberal-minded people would keep their distance from.

Intervention can take many other forms, from the softest, e.g. moral spotlighting, to others with some muscle, like economic sanctions.

Nor is it obvious that national sovereignty is the only possible way of ordering the world. The European Union is engaged in a huge experiment in building a new political order of multiple levels of cross-engagement among 27 countries that represents a turning away from the notion of absolute national sovereignty.

I agree with you about legislation, though I wouldn’t have said that they can “only be granted” by those means. Firstly, as New Delhi has showed, it can be achieved via the courts. Also, I would have used the word “secured” rather than “granted”. Rights after all are supposed to be inherent; they are not for legislatures to bestow or take away.

LGBT rights can only be granted by legislation. I would like to see a Commonwealth pledge at the 2009 CHOGM to legalise Homo/Bi/Transsexuality in 2010, with all member states as signatories. We need consensus, and consensus through discussion, not coercion.

\Let people rule their country the way they want to\ is old hat. The age of absolute national sovereignty is past, if it was ever so. In a globalised age, what one country does, e.g. environment, human rights abuses, letting disease run out of control, unregulated food safety, has effects across borders. Our humanity does not stop at our country’s borders, otherwise we wouldn’t be caring about famine in country X or political prisoners in country Y.

Governments will always prefer to cling to the notion of national sovereignty, but this doesn’t mean that concerned people should just give up and concede the point. Granted, on the international stage, there aren’t well-developed mechanisms for letting the concerns of a common humanity get through to the thick skulls of some governments. But to the extent that these governments want recognition and honour on the world stage, then we should leverage on that vainglorious desire to try to get the message through: that they should first stand judged by international public opinion and be held to higher standards of human rights. Keeping up a drumbeat through conversations such as this will have results down the road. Persuading more enlightened governments to apply peer pressure on less enlightened ones is the way to go.

My second thought is this: \Let people rule their country the way they want to\ is often the prescription for majoritarianism to ride roughshod over the rights of minorities within countries. Typically, you’d have a majority (or a dominant group claiming to be a majority) saying they speak for ALL the people in a country, then imposing their ideas on the minorities within their borders. \We are the people\ they will say, because \We are the majority\. This kind of thing is offensive to the very concept of human rights, which is that there are spheres for each individual which majoritarian blocs cannot intrude into and take away. But who will speak up for those minorities?

To speak of our cultures as an institution that denies the existence of fluid/various sexual and gender identity other than the ‘normalized’ heterosexuality is to uphold a false belief as all our different cultures have documented/undocumented evidence of the existence of queer identified persons,and as in the case in my country Kenya-they were individuals who possessed/or were believed to be a third spirit/a link between the living and the dead.(search the Kamba community)as an example.In addition the communities permitted same sex customary marriages (see kikuyu,kisii, communities)
Nevertheless,the question is not if we exist,its our rightful experience of life in diversified gender and sexual orientation and the extent to which our governments are willing to uphold our human dignity.
In my country,and i believe in most of the states that criminalize ‘unnatural acts against the order of nature’ the question of my rights to privacy is altered:to successfully prosecute any alleged homosexuality claims,there is dire need for the evidence to amount to proof beyond reasonable doubt!and how exactly is the state going to find me engaging in this acts if they are not breaking into my private space?refer to Victor Mukasa and Yvonne Oyoo vs the republic of uganda where the house of the claimants was raided in the search for evidence of being homosexuals/promoting homosexuality.
To gain access to such evidence, the police/ investigators result in appalling and humiliating strategies such as bursting open doors of suspected homosexuals(both in private homes and hotel rooms or social events), blackmailing suspects or coercing them for evidence.Most of this acts will amount to physical,emotional and sexual violence in the case where the victim trying to defend themselves.
Criminalizing the state of being of any human being is a dangerous attempt to classify persons as second class citizens and deny them of their inherent human rights,for the common wealth states objective to promote human rights and seek redress for violations,is hindered by the existence of this draconian laws that were actually inherited during colonialism,In addition, the struggle for democracy cannot certainly be conqured if all citizens of the state are not born equal and free before the law.

‘Diversity’ applies on an individual level, not a national one. The Commonwealth has supported the idea that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can claim national sovereignty due to an inherited racial principle or somesuch tripe, an idea which has resulted in colossal instability over the last hundred years. One must note that the most stable, successful, and long-lasting states have been ones where different races and nationalities have been forced to live together, not elected to do so. Examples: The Hapsburg Empire, the Republic of Kazakhstan, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

A nation which claims an inherited Homophobic culture as a justification for discriminating between its citizens is a nation which has become irrelevant. If the Commonwealth can’t agree on simple issues of human rights (and this is something included in the UN charter as well) it should reconsider its fundamental principles.

I think it very interesting that Member States seem as incapable of repealing homophobic legislation as they are of maintaining Health, Education and Transport infrastructure. Get your act together, Commonwealth! Reach some consensus!

Mark Zamen, author