Speaking as the Patron of the Human Dignity Trust in London, UK on November 28 at the showing of the film `Call me Kuchu’, Ramphal declared that “As with the abolition of slavery, the decriminalisation of homosexuality in our time must be an act of law”.
Drawing parallels with the terror of the Salem, Massachusetts witch hunts, the abolitionist movement and the campaign against apartheid in South Africa, Ramphal referred to the persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and declared that an end must be put to this wrong.
He noted that for most of the developing countries of the Commonwealth the “desecration” of LGBT rights had its origins in law. “The unreformed law of England was transported through criminal codes by imperial masters to far flung outposts of empire. Starting with the imposition of Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code – criminalising same- sex relations was to spread throughout the empire to the point where today 42 of 54 Commonwealth countries have virtually the same legislation enacted almost as a matter of course by colonial administrators – not by the societies they governed.” Ramphal, a former Guyana Attorney General, referred to the Wolfenden Report which brought change to UK same-sex relations laws in 1967 and said by then these Commonwealth jurisdictions were free of British control but that the attitudes that had followed the law remained unreformed. “That law is still on our statute books – a relic of empire that has no place in a modern Commonwealth”, he asserted. In his address entitled `Equal members of the Commonwealth of God’, Ramphal adverted to an admonition by the author of the report that reformed the UK’s same-sex laws, Sir John Wolfenden, that “unless a deliberate attempt is made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business” and urged that this wisdom must influence change.
“That wisdom must now inspire us in the developing countries of the Commonwealth to rid ourselves of this archaic legal inheritance. We are here to call for that decriminalising act of law, and by it an end to the wrong we do to our brothers and sisters – who are, like us, all members of what Dr Rowan Williams called “the Commonwealth of God”, he urged.
Earlier in his address he said a reference by the Lord Bishop of Leicester in the House of Lords on the `Treatment of Homosexual Men and Women in the Developing World’ had struck a chord in him when the Lord Bishop compared the present treatment of LGBT persons to the burning of witches in the UK.
“In my own ancestry, is a line through my mother’s side of the family which goes back to a settler in Barbados who sought his fortunes in Guyana. His name was Nurse, and he was one of the Nurses who we believe came to Barbados from the new England Colonies as descendants of Rebecca Nurse fleeing the abominations of the witch hunts of Massachusetts, and of Salem in particular. Rebecca was hanged – though later pardoned for the innocence of being herself. The hand of evil reaches out beyond our imaginings –and over generations”, Ramphal said.
