HIV/AIDS: Commonwealth Countries

Lord Bishop of Newcastle Excerpts

Wednesday 13th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Newcastle]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Black, for his powerful, moving and, indeed, sometimes bleak speech, which spelt out so strongly and persuasively the link between the criminalisation of homosexuality and the rate of HIV infection and death from AIDS. This timely debate is taking place in the week when the charter has been agreed and signed up to by all the Commonwealth nations. It expresses that it is,

“implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds”.

I take “other grounds” to mean also on grounds of sexuality, although the charter does not spell that out, which suggests there is still a very great deal of work to be done.

Noble Lords may remember that it was almost 50 years ago now, in 1967, that the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, spoke in this House to support the decriminalisation of homosexuality in this country. We sometimes underestimate how brave a stance that was from him at that time. By doing so, he made the distinction in British law between a moral and a criminal matter. One of the problems today is that no such distinction has been made in many parts of the Commonwealth and, as a result of criminalisation, people continue to suffer terrible abuse—sometimes death—and the scourge of HIV/AIDS continues unchecked. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, said, in recent years in some countries there has been an increase in stigmatisation, discrimination and criminalisation, which of course threatens to undermine all the good work that has been done with HIV/AIDS.

It is very well known that on matters to do with homosexuality the churches in general, and the Anglican communion in particular, are deeply divided. However, there are not, and cannot be, any grounds for denying the equality before the law of every single human being, whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. Many of us in this country value and indeed treasure our links with particular dioceses around the Anglican communion. In my case, over the past dozen years or more, that has been with the diocese of Botswana. HIV/AIDS was a disaster for that country, although things are now improving significantly. The Botswana Government have been actively providing public health education and public healthcare and the HIV/AIDS rate is in decline. There has been a much more positive response in Botswana than in some other neighbouring African countries.

Few have spoken out of southern Africa as clearly as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said to a United Nations panel in 2010:

“All over the world, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are persecuted. They face violence, torture and criminal sanctions of how they live and who they love. We make them doubt that they too are children of God—and this must be nearly the ultimate blasphemy … Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa … are living in fear. And they are living in hiding—away from care, away from the protection the State should offer to every citizen and away from health care, when all of us … need access to essential HIV services”.

The noble Lord, Lord Black, issued a challenge to me in his opening speech. He believes, he says, that the Church of England has got great sway within the Commonwealth. If only that were so. Much more importantly than that, he challenged me to condemn criminalisation specifically because of the way in which it endangers and squanders human life. I will say as clearly as I can that criminalisation is wrong. I know when I say that that I speak not just for myself but for other members of this Bench, and I want to say it as clearly as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester did in a previous debate a few months ago. If criminalisation leads, as it evidently does, to gay people concealing their identity, that is wrong. If criminalisation leads to many living in fear, that is wrong. If criminalisation leads to the prospect of persecution, arrest, detention and death, that is wrong. If criminalisation means that LGBT people dare not turn to the state when facing violence and hate crimes, that is wrong. If criminalisation hinders the treatment of people with HIV/AIDS, that is wrong.

It is within the lifetime of most of us in this House that the law in this country was changed to decriminalise homosexual acts. We need to seek to bring change and a completely new climate in those many countries of the Commonwealth where same-sex relations are still criminal offences. I very much hope that this debate will assist and serve that cause. Let the last words again come from Africa and Desmond Tutu:

“Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice”.