by APARNA ALLURI & HARRY STEVENS
Gay rights activists celebrate in New Delhi on February 2, 2016, after the Supreme Court agreed to review a decision that criminalises gay sex PHOTO/Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times
Most countries that still criminalise homosexuality are former colonies. That’s not a coincidence.
India’s Supreme Court will soon revisit the country’s controversial ban on homosexuality— a 156-year-old law that punishes “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” with imprisonment.
Indians are among nearly 2.8 billion people who still live in countries that criminalize gay sex. Punishment varies by country. People can be fined, arrested, prosecuted and, if found guilty, imprisoned, whipped, or even executed.
These laws are often defended on the grounds that they are preserving an ancient or traditional ban on same-sex relationships. But the truth is they are far more recent. In fact, the history of anti-sodomy laws dovetails with the history of colonialism, according to data compiled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
For several months now, a team of researchers at the Commission has been documenting the history of laws that punish same-sex relations. Based on their data, and our own, we have built a map — starting in 1790, it shows when and where homosexuality was criminalised and, later, decriminalised.
“This map tells a story,” said Charles Radcliffe, one of the researchers who also heads the global issues team at the Commission. “There’s clearly a link between the expansion of the European empires — especially the British, but also the Spanish and Portuguese empires — and the spread of punitive laws against homosexuality in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.”
What does this map tell you?
More than half of the 76 countries that still have these laws are former European colonies, particularly British — India, Myanmar, Sudan, Zambia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and so on. Even those countries that have since scrubbed the law from their books — such as Brazil or Argentina — did so only after they won independence.
“When the 19th century began, there were some 50 countries that we could identify that criminalized same sex relationships,” said Radcliffe. “By the time it ended, that number had doubled.” In those 100 years, Britain occupied large parts of Asia and Africa. Many of these countries, including India, didn’t have explicit laws on sexual orientation until they were colonised.
Is this a big deal?
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