Make Punishment For LGBTQ+ Bill Reformative- Xavier Sosu

Hajara FuseiniJuly 28, 2021

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Member of Parliament for Madina has suggested that the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values sponsored by the Private Members should be reviewed in terms of its sanctions.

In an interview, he said the current proposed sanctions of imprisonment is retributive which would not favour the country at this point in time.

“Challenges in terms of definition, challenges in terms of how to criminalize values and culture of people and then it also has challenges with the kind of sentence regime, it seeks to impose, particularly at the time that we all complaining about prisons being choked and the fact that we should be moving from punishment being reformative than being retributive for me generally looking at the bill in its current form”, Xavier Sosu said on News Night on Joy News.

His colleague lawmaker, Vincent Ekow Asafuah has also raised a similar concern.

According to him, the sanctions need a second look at.

“The challenge with the draft bill is that it does not portray enough anger to prospective people who will be acting at variance to the draft bill. I say this in specific to the punishment that is supposed to be meted out to people who engages in these acts that are criminalized under the bill. My opinion is that the draft bill should be angry enough to be able to deter people who will engage in acts that fall within this bill. “

“If we categorize this under misdemeanor, for example and we say, people who engage in unnatural carnal knowledge will be punished by 500-5000 penalty units, we all know that one penalty unit is about 12cedis. The people who have been engaging in this act will be able to pay with ease and so I am of the opinion that we take a second look into the punishment which is supposed to be meted out and should portray enough anger to deter people”, MP for Old Tafo Constituency said on JoyNews.

Meanwhile, General Secretary of the Ghana Pentecostal Charismatic Council, Rev. Emmanuel T. Barriga has noted that their outfit is opened to criticisms from the general public in shaping the bill which is yet to be presented before Parliament for scrutiny.

“People have started talking about the sanctions regime. People are talking about the threat to free speech and all that. These are the area where we think people can write memoranda and present papers for a look at and address so that eventually we can have this bill passed.”

“We are part of the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Right and Family Values so this one is coming from us but we are humble enough to admit that we are not perfect. There may be gaps; there may be things in the bill that may be fine-tuned. As the saying goes, ‘two heads are better than one’. We have presented something we think is good for the whole country and we are calling for inputs from the general society so that we can improve on it and make it better so I don’t think it is a wrong call”, he said on News Night.

Eight legislators are to submit a Private Members Bill to Parliament for review and debate to criminalize Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning in Ghana.