The Justice Minister in Mali announced Thursday that the West African nation is moving forward with a law to outlaw homosexuality.
The country’s ruling National Transitional Council adopted the measure by a nearly unanimous vote last week. The bill still needs approval from the country’s military leaders, according to Agence France-Presse.
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The vote was 131 in favor and 1 against.
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“There are now provisions prohibiting homosexuality in Mali, and that anyone engaging in this practice or promoting or condoning it will be prosecuted,” the Malian Minister of Justice Mamadou Kassogue announced last week.
#AESinfo | #Mali 🇲🇱 Le Mali dit non à la dégradation des mœurs : L’homosexualité interdite
Une décision attendue par de nombreux Maliens, l’État a adopté une nouvelle loi criminalisant l’homosexualité et interdisant toute forme de promotion ou d’apologie de cette pratique.
The new law makes good on a promise by the government in 2022 when Kassogue declared, “Homosexuality is an unnatural relationship. There are no specific [laws against it at present in Mali]. We are going to pass laws to prohibit it in our country.”
In December, Kassogue, whose full title is Minister of Justice and Human Rights, signed a United Nations pledge committing Mali to promote and protect human rights.
Mali’s ruling junta came to power three years ago in a coup.
Any law singling out sexual minorities would be in violation of the African Charter on Human Rights, said Alice Nkom, a prominent attorney and LGBTQ+ rights defender in Cameroon.
A resolution passed in 2014 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights compels signatories to protect citizens from violence and other human rights violations on the basis of real or assumed sexual identity or orientation, she said.
Details and proposed punishments in the new penal code have yet to be announced.
In neighboring Burkina Faso, also ruled by a military junta, the Transitional Legislative Assembly will meet soon to approve similar sanctions criminalizing homosexual behavior.
Last year, Burkina Faso’s High Council of Communication, which regulates the media, issued a “ban on the broadcasting of television channels promoting homosexuality.”
Both Mali and Burkina Faso are majority Muslim.
At least 30 countries in Africa criminalize homosexuality, either based on colonial-era laws imposed by the British and other European nations or through new laws adopted in a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation passed in the last several years.
Uganda’s Kill the Gays law, signed in 2023, is among the most notorious, imposing a death sentence for the crime of “aggravated homosexuality” in the East African nation. Neighboring Ghana adopted similar legislation this year.
In July, Congo’s Public Prosecutor ordered regional prosecutors to initiate proceedings “against the perpetrators of deviant practices of a sexual and homosexual nature, as well as the perpetrators of noise pollution,” despite the country having no prohibitions of same-sex acts in current law.
Congo, Uganda and Ghana are all majority Christian nations.
Mali’s Justice Minister summed up the reasoning of disparate African countries uniting in opposition to homosexuality when he said recently, “We will not accept our customs and values being violated by people from elsewhere.”
While anti-LGBTQ+ laws are on the rise across Africa, several countries have decriminalized homosexuality since 2012, including Gabon, Mauritius, Angola, Lesotho, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, Botswana, and Mozambique.
Namibia’s High Court struck down that nation’s anti-sodomy law in June.
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