Namibian Queer Community Secure Another Landmark Win in Court
A high court in Namibia has struck down two colonial-era laws criminalizing gay sex, deeming them as unconstitutional.
Colonial-era laws which provided punishments for “sodomy” and “unnatural sexual offenses,” have today been struck down by a high court in Namibia. The ruling comes just over a year after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriages contracted abroad can be legally recognized.
“It’s a great day for Namibia,” Friedel Dausab, the civil rights activist who initiated the case, told reporters after the ruling was announced on Friday morning. Dausab’s case was supported by U.K.-based non-governmental organization Human Dignity Trust. “It won’t be a crime to love anymore,” he added.
Namibia adopted the laws after its independence from South Africa in 1990, and prior to that, had been a League of Nations administered territory, and a German colony. South Africa has since decriminalised consensual same-sex sexual relations and has gone on to legalize same-sex marriage. Namibia’s high court ruling falls within a wider context of a few Southern African countries reckoning with archaic, anti-queer laws from the past.
In late 2021, a court of appeal in Botswana upheld a high court ruling from two years earlier that decriminalized homosexual relations. The country is seemingly on the precipice of legally assenting to same-sex marriages, however, its proposal was met with protests by religious, conservative groups last year.
A similar complex situation is set to play out in Namibia despite the recent landmark rulings. After last May’s Supreme Court’s ruling, the upper house of parliament passed two anti-LGBTQ bills, one that strictly stipulates that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and another that bans same-sex marriage and punishes its supporters.
The bills are currently awaiting the president’s signature, but the Supreme Court’s ruling has brought into question its constitutional foundations, and the high court ruling will only raise more questions. “I have not seen bills written deliberately contradict judgments,” opposition leader McHenry Venaanitold AFP last year. “I am not sure it would pass the test of constitutionality.”
While it is expected that the government will appeal within the next 21 days, the new ruling is expected to relax the anti-LGBTQ backlash in the last year, which partly stemmed from the bills that were passed. According to Amnesty International, queer people have been victims of “violent cyber-attacks and a wave in online harassment… as well as frequent targeting and scapegoating by politicians before [the] November 2024 elections.”