Category: gay rights
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Ban Ki-Moon on gay rights in Africa
It’s no secret that the treatment of gays and respect for gay rights in Africa can be spotty at best. (See, e.g., previous coverage on this blog of a particularly chilling chain of events in Uganda here, here, and here. And let’s not forget Zimbabwe either.)
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Pakistan’s Supreme Court Leads Again: Transgender Rights
While Pakistan’s military has egg on its face this week, it is important to recall that not all of Pakistan’s institutions are weak or broken. The Supreme Court under Justice Chaudhry continues to play an active role in a judicialized political environment.
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A sad postscript to the Ugandan High Court anti-gay hate speech ruling
A sad postscript to the Ugandan High Court ruling against the Ugandan tabloid “Rolling Stone” (no relation to the American magazine) that had outed gays and urged that they be killed, discussed previously on this blog here and here. The three named plaintiffs in the case, all very brave gay rights advocates, had argued that…
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The Canadian angle to the Ugandan High Court’s ruling
Follow-up on Tom’s very timely coverage of the Ugandan High Court decision forbidding a tabloid newspaper from publishing the names and pictures of suspected homosexuals (and urging that they be killed). The CBC reports on the Canadian angle to this story: the Ugandan decision cited with approval a 2002 Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench decision…
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Uganda High Court finds anti-gay discrimination, enjoins paper
Uganda has received a good deal of attention since anti-homosexual legislation was proposed in parliament in 2009. Though the legislation has still not been passed, the environment for gays in Uganda remains by all accounts harrowing. Today, the High Court ruled that a newspaper story which listed the names and addresses of homosexuals under the…
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California’s gay marriage ban struck down as unconstitutional
American readers are likely to have heard this already, but this is sufficiently big to be of interest to readers elsewhere. Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, originally appointed by George Bush Sr.,
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Gay rights in Zimbabwe: perhaps not just yet
If you’re looking for an example of a country where gay rights are not exactly catching on, look no further than Zimbabwe. The BBC reports that Robert Mugabe, not exactly a darling of Western liberals to begin with, had this to say about the possibility of introducing gay rights into the new constitution under discussion:…
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The Irish SC and Gay Rights
Last week the Irish Supreme Court handed down a significant decision in relation to the rights of gays and lesbians living in Ireland. In McD v. L [2009[ IESC 81, the Supreme Court held that in a dispute over legal guardianship and access, a male biological parents (and sperm donor) was in principle entitled to…
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Jamaican PM wants constitution to ban gay marriage
In our large project on the characteristics of written constitutions of independent nation-states, one of the questions we included was whether or not the constitution provided for gay marriage. We were somewhat surprised to learn that the only place with a clear constitutional right to gay marriage was our survey instrument!
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The Lawrence of India (Pt 2) (the Supreme Court Sequel)
In a recent post (7/5/09), I reported and commented on the decision of the Delhi High Court in NAZ Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi & Ors, reading down 377 of the Indian Criminal Code, so as to apply only to “nonconsensual penile non-vaginal sex and penile non-vaginal sex involving minors” – a decision…