The right to dignity of sexual minorities has continued to be violated across Africa, necessitating the need to deploy national, regional, and global human rights to secure its promotion and protection. Human dignity is a central value of the international human rights normative system and over the last few decades, the international human rights system has generally accepted the notion that all humans are endowed with equal dignity. Although the concept of dignity itself and the scope of its application continues to be contested by states, human rights documents acknowledge the recognition of the inherent dignity of all persons without discrimination. Unfortunately, sexual minorities in Africa continue to be stripped of their dignity through acts of public and private humiliation; criminalisation of their identities under laws that specify penalties ranging from prison terms to the death sentence, and through hate speech and acts of violence. The application of the concept of human dignity to the protection of sexual minorities in Africa remains problematic in state law and policy. This article contends that, based on the state’s recognition and protection of the inherent dignity of human beings, all African states still owe obligations toward sexual minorities. To this end, this article examines the development of the concept of dignity in Western thought and its subsequent impact on international human rights law. It also teases out the meaning of dignity in international human rights law under global and regional jurisprudence with a view to highlighting the obligations of African states towards sexual minorities.
Critical Legal Studies suggests that any serious legal advocacy must critically engage with the social and political subtext of the law in order to yield positive outcomes. This suggestion is equally applicable to advocacy for sexual and gender minorities in contexts such as Nigeria. Based on this premise, this article employs theories of political homophobia, elite power and social exclusion to analyse the social and political context surrounding the evolution of criminalising laws during the colonial phase of Nigeria's history. The article proceeds to show that political homophobia, through laws that criminalised same-sex relationships, was a strategic tool utilised under the colonial administration to protect colonial interests and maintain the legitimacy of colonisation. This strategy was a colonial imperative regardless of whether or not the local population may have agreed to or participated in the process. The outcome of, and incentive for, this process of political homophobia included the social exclusion of a large majority of the population for the benefit of an elite class. It is argued that an understanding of the rationale behind the colonial evolution of anti-gay laws can provide an insight into the entrenchment of political homophobia in Nigeria and similar legal systems in Africa and challenge the rhetoric that these laws reflect African values.
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