Rockson-Nelson Defeamekpor, one of the private members sponsoring the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, 2021, has averred the purpose of the bill is not meant to incarcerate offenders as being perceived.
He says they sponsored the bill, also known as Anti-gay bill, to prevent people indulging in the act to desist from it, and to establish a reformed society.
The bill criminalises sex between persons of the same sex, between a man or woman and an animal or object, proposing imprisonment of between 3 and 5 years. However, the Constitutional and Legal Affairs Committee recommended a jail term of up to 3 years without suggesting a minimum sentence.
The Legislature, has, meanwhile, has not agreed on the appropriate punishment for LGBTQ+ persons engaging in unnatural carnal knowledge with each other.
But according to the MP, “nobody is intending to imprison anybody with this bill. It is a conduct that we think that we should check as a sovereign people.”
“I support the lower limit. The legislation we are considering, which would lead to an enactment, involves certain aspects of conduct that we need to proscribe, and not all of them should necessarily lead to custodial sentences. Regarding the minimum, which became a point of contention on the floor, it means the court wouldn’t have the discretion to even caution someone and discharge them after they have been convicted. However, the intention of this legislation is not necessarily to imprison people,” he said Tuesday, December 12, 2023 on Accra-based Joy FM.
He explained that the court, depending on the nature of a case, can give culprits the second chance to ‘go and sin no more’.
“There would be circumstances where, after a successful prosecution and conviction, the court may be inclined, depending on the peculiarity of the case and the applicable law, to merely caution the person to go and be of good conduct,” he noted.
He charged the international bodies who are condemning the bill to have a second look at it to appreciate its prime focus of reforming society and not necessarily to punish.
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