Treatment of Homosexual Men and Women in the Developing World

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Black of Brentwood]

My Lords, we should all be indebted to my noble friend Lord Lexden, who has worked hard to secure this debate. His speech was extremely powerful, its contents raw and shocking, and its message profoundly important.

I start with a simple question: why should this matter to us? It is important to explain why the UK, with this House in the vanguard, should care. I have four reasons. First, as my noble friend explained, we caused this problem. That so many people around the globe still suffer from legal discrimination is one toxic legacy of empire. It is our duty to help sort that out.

Secondly, we must recognise that if we do not do anything to tackle the problem, it will manifest itself at our borders, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, said, as people persecuted on grounds of sexual orientation rightly seek asylum here, for in their own country they may be degraded, tortured or killed. It is our duty to help.

Thirdly, we should understand that this is not a problem simply confined to faraway parts of the globe. It occurs in countries that we regularly visit. Many do business in Russia, yet many regions in Russia, most notably St Petersburg, have introduced legislation to punish homosexual propaganda. In Lithuania, a member of the EU, the Parliament is currently progressing an anti-gay Bill. In Tunisia, where many people go on holiday, the Government have recently refused to decriminalise homosexuality. This problem is on our doorstep. It is our duty to help.

Finally, we owe it to those who fought prejudice and legal barriers to equality in our own country to take their legacy, and apply it in those countries where intolerance and bigotry still exist. As a gay man who has lived his life in a tolerant, liberal atmosphere and who has never had to fight discrimination because my forebears fought that battle for me, I believe we need to act in gratitude and, sometimes, in memory of them. That is why we should care, and should help.

In those tasks, we have the support of a number of organisations: the Human Dignity Trust, which is tackling the issue at its core, Stonewall and Kaleidoscope, which are working to make this world a better place. I salute them.

I am an optimist. The march of history is on our side. We should recognise that some progress has been made. In recent years, Fiji, as we have heard, India, Nicaragua, Panama and Nepal have all decriminalised homosexuality, with others such as the Seychelles committed to do so. Botswana, Mozambique and Mauritius have adopted legislation to prevent workplace discrimination, though penal codes still punish private behaviour in those countries.

The awful news is that as we debate this here today, at least 12 people world wide are currently in prison for violating laws that punish those who are born gay, lesbian or bisexual. Another 13 await trial. Three imprisoned are in Nigeria and eight in Cameroon. One—a 27 year-old man—is in Saudi Arabia, where his five-year prison sentence was accompanied by 500 lashes. In Cameroon, Jean-Claude Rogere Mbede is appealing a three-year sentence for sending an intimate text message to man who he thought was his friend. I am delighted that the Human Dignity Trust, supported by Clifford Chance, will be using his case to challenge the law criminalising homosexuality. In the same country, Yntebeng Pascal is awaiting trial for being “too effeminate”.

Perhaps they are in some ways the lucky ones, for they are still alive. Those figures of the number of people in prison do not include people executed in one of the seven countries where being gay is a capital crime. They do not include thousands who die from AIDS because LGBT people are excluded from effective HIV prevention programmes, or where stigma drives the illness underground where it is untreated. I was appalled to hear from the brave Jamaicans that I met with my noble friend Lord Lexden that HIV infection rates in that country are 32 times higher among men who have sex with men than among heterosexuals. Nor do the figures include the gay men who commit suicide because of the scorn they suffer when the structure of law discriminates against them—as many as 250 in Peru in recent years. They do not include those, such as David Kato in Uganda, who have been murdered for standing up for gay rights, or the Kenyan man stoned to death in a Nairobi slum by a mob in June of this year. In the chronicle of man’s inhumanity to man, in too many parts of our world, the suffering of gay men and women still stands out as a terrible indictment, including a significant number, as we have heard to our continuing shame, in the Commonwealth.

I said earlier that I was an optimist. I am also a realist and I know that there is a limit to what our Government can achieve. But we can do something. Of course, resources are tight, but we should, as a priority, commit to supporting decriminalisation programmes. We can work with the EU, which magnifies our influence, to tackle the problem. DfID can make sure that its human rights commitments include LGBT rights and decriminalisation in particular. That would sit in tandem with the vital work that the Human Dignity Trust is doing to tackle the problem at source in the structure of law. We must hold the feet of the Commonwealth to the fire to turn its fine words into action.

Finally, success in the areas that we have been talking about today—legislation, human rights, litigation and institutional barriers to equality—is but one first step. In many ways, the second is even more difficult; that is, cultural change. Let us consider this: in the UK, the structure of law changed in 1967. It probably took four decades for public opinion to catch up with the change in law. In the Commonwealth, in the developing world, that task will be even greater. That is but one reason why we must not delay in the first step. Time is not on our side.