this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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World Without US

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**World news, outside the US.** Original rationale: unless moderated, internal US news and politics often dominates world news in English, because of its demographic position. This magazine/community is to post news and articles from around the globe, but posts must have a mainly non-US component or focus. Submissions related in some way to the Alan Weisman book *The World Without Us*, which is about what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from the planet, are also welcome. :)

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Influential people in Ghana are speaking out against the country’s dangerous anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) bill that increases criminal penalties for consensual same-sex conduct and criminalizes individuals and organizations who advocate for the rights of LGBT people.

Last week, Samia Nkrumah, a former member of parliament and chair of a major political party in Ghana, urged the president to veto an anti-LGBT bill, calling it “brutal, harsh, and unjust.” Nkrumah’s father, Kwame, is a towering figure in Africa and Ghana’s history, having led the independence movement and served as the country’s first president and prime minister in the 1950s and 60s.

On February 28, Ghana’s parliament passed a draconian bill that increases criminal penalties for consensual same-sex conduct and criminalizes individuals and organizations who advocate for the rights of LGBT people. Additionally, the bill criminalizes failure to report an LGBT person to the authorities and to report anyone who uses their social media platform to produce, publish, or disseminate content promoting activities prohibited by the bill.

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[–] livus@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

From the article:

Since then, prominent individuals, such as Nkrumah, have urged President Nana Akufo Addo to reject the bill. This includes a memo from Ghana’s finance minister to the president, warning of the bill’s disastrous economic consequences if it were to become law.

Ghana’s current criminal law, derived from British colonial-era laws, punishes same-sex conduct between men with a maximum penalty of three years in prison. The recent push for increasingly harsh legislation has already had consequences for LGBT people in Ghana. After the introduction of the bill in 2021, twenty-one LGBT activists were unlawfully arrested and detained for holding a human rights education meeting on the grounds that they were promoting homosexuality and that the gathering was an unlawful assembly.

On Ghana’s Independence Day, March 6, protestors gathered outside Ghanaian high commissions in London, Johannesburg, and elsewhere to demonstrate pan-African and global solidarity against the egregious and harmful bill. President Addo has said with regard to the bill that he will not allow the country to backslide on human rights and the rule of law.