A series of 4 articles gaze complications with policy, authorized guidelines, rights, culture, fresh culture, language, stigma, crimes, discrimination and person ride of the odd community in four African international locations.
Six years ago, at the age of simply 21, Letsweletse Motshidiemang made up our minds to birth a accurate drawl in opposition to the Botswana authorities. Gentle-spoken and measured in tone, Motshidiemang explains his decision to drawl sections of the country’s penal code which criminalises identical-intercourse sexual relations.
” ought to you may per chance maybe well even have entirely popular who you may per chance maybe well very nicely be and have made peace alongside with your sexuality? I bought to that level and simply felt it was utterly simply for me to fight for my rights in a lawful diagram… That’s why I took the authorities to courtroom.”
It labored in his favour. On 11 June 2019, the Gaborone High Court ruled that these sections of the penal code — which imposed a most sentence of seven years’ imprisonment for consensual identical-intercourse relations — had been “discriminatory because they recall away the utterly come of sexual expression of the applicant” and violate his simply to “liberty, privateness and dignity”.
In handing down his judgment, mediate Michael Leburu talked about it was “now now not in the public interest” to criminalise identical-intercourse sexual…
