TGR
Dispatches from the Field — The Genocide Report
Washington, DC — 7 August 2023
Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act (2023), signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni on 26 May, represents a significant escalation in the state’s regulation of sexual orientation and gender identity. Building on decades of discrimination, the law introduces expansive criminal penalties, including life imprisonment and the death penalty, while restricting speech, association, and access to services. Its provisions extend beyond criminalization to reshape social, legal, and institutional environments, raising serious concerns about systematic persecution, human rights violations, and the broader risk of atrocity crimes.
Criminalization and Legal Penalties
The Anti-Homosexuality Act imposes severe penalties for same-sex relations, including life imprisonment, and introduces additional offenses such as “attempted homosexuality,” punishable by up to 14 years in prison. It further criminalizes what it terms the “promotion of homosexuality,” exposing individuals and organizations providing support or advocacy to penalties of up to 20 years’ imprisonment.
Most notably, the law introduces the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” a provision that dramatically escalates the legal consequences associated with sexual orientation and identity. These measures collectively transform identity into a basis for criminal liability, embedding discrimination within the legal system.
The Act also endorses so-called “conversion” practices. Widely discredited, such practices have been characterized internationally as cruel, inhuman, and degrading, and in some cases as amounting to torture.
When discrimination is codified into law, it not only legitimizes abuse but creates the conditions for systematic persecution.”
Institutionalized Discrimination and Social Impact
The law extends beyond formal penalties to reshape social behavior. By mandating the reporting of suspected violations, including by family members, it fractures social cohesion and incentivizes surveillance and denunciation. Individuals face heightened risks of eviction, job loss, and social exclusion.
Human rights reporting since the law’s enactment indicates a sharp increase in abuses, including arbitrary detention, police violence, extortion, and forced displacement. Access to healthcare has also been significantly restricted, as fear of exposure deters individuals from seeking medical services, including HIV prevention and treatment.
The cumulative effect is the normalization of discrimination and the creation of an environment in which violence and abuse can occur with reduced accountability.
Climate of Fear and Targeted Violence
The Act has contributed to a pervasive climate of fear among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other diverse persons in Uganda. Individuals are increasingly forced into hiding, while support networks have shifted to informal and clandestine operations to avoid legal repercussions.
Documented cases illustrate the severity of the impact. Individuals have been subjected to violence, sexual assault, and displacement, often without recourse to justice. Perpetrators frequently act with impunity, enabled by a legal framework that criminalizes victims rather than protects them.
The combination of legal penalties, social stigma, and reduced access to protection mechanisms creates conditions in which targeted violence can persist and escalate.
International Response and Human Rights Obligations
The legislation has been widely condemned by international actors, including the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and multiple human rights organizations. Critics argue that the law is incompatible with Uganda’s constitutional commitments and its obligations under international human rights law.
The Act raises fundamental concerns regarding non-discrimination, privacy, freedom of expression, and protection from torture and degrading treatment. It also undermines broader development objectives by exacerbating inequality and marginalization.
Calls from the international community have emphasized the need for Uganda to align its domestic legal framework with international standards and to take active measures to prevent violence and discrimination.
Atrocity Prevention Lens
Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act introduces legal, social, and institutional conditions that heighten the risk of systematic persecution against a defined group. The criminalization of identity, combined with severe penalties and mandated reporting, creates identifiable targets and enables patterns of abuse, including arbitrary detention, violence, and social exclusion. These dynamics align with early warning indicators of atrocity risk, particularly where state policy facilitates or legitimizes harm against a protected group. Prevention strategies require sustained international engagement, monitoring of abuses, protection of civil society actors, and pressure to reverse or mitigate legal frameworks that enable discrimination and violence.
Legal Framework
International Human Rights Law
Uganda is bound by multiple international human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Act raises concerns regarding violations of rights to equality before the law, non-discrimination, privacy, freedom of expression, and protection from arbitrary detention.
Prohibition of Torture and Cruel Treatment
Practices associated with “conversion therapy,” as well as documented abuses such as physical violence and degrading treatment, may violate the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under international law.
Crimes Against Humanity
Where acts such as persecution, imprisonment, or other severe deprivations of liberty are carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, they may constitute crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
State Responsibility
States have an obligation to protect individuals within their jurisdiction from violence and discrimination. Laws that institutionalize harm or enable abuses may engage state responsibility under international law, particularly where they facilitate or fail to prevent violations.
Suggested Citation
TGR. “Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act: Criminalization, Persecution, and Atrocity Risk.” Dispatches from the Field. The Genocide Report, Washington, DC, 7 August 2023.
Photo credit
Marching in solidarity with Uganda’s LGBTI community. By Alisdare Hickson from Canterbury, United Kingdom. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
About TGR
The Genocide Report (TGR) publishes analysis and educational resources on conflict, international law, and atrocity prevention. Its work seeks to bridge academic research, field realities, and public understanding of mass violence and civilian protection.