Namibia: New Report Considers LGBTQI+ Rights After Landmark Rulings
A new report considers the ongoing fight to recognise Namibia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and intersex (LGBTQI+) community’s constitutional and human rights in the wake of a number of pivotal court cases.
Commissioned by the Institute for Public Policy Research and written by independent human rights practitioner Abigail Solomons, ‘Not Yet Uhuru – Gender and LGBT Rights in Namibia: Opportunities, Gaps and Challenges’ was launched last month.
‘Uhuru’ is the Swahili word for ‘freedom’. The term is embedded in the language of various African liberation struggles. Solomons says the title of the report is a deliberate provocation.
“Namibia’s independence was celebrated as uhuru arriving at last. A nation governed for a century by colonial rule, and then by the systematic brutality of racial apartheid, declared that it would be governed instead by justice,” says Solomons in the report.
“President Geingob gave that vision a name: the Namibian House — a republic in which every citizen would be sheltered, valued and protected by the same law. It’s a house built for everyone but not everyone was let in,” Solomons says.
“This report is an account of how that gap came to be, what it costs in human terms and what it will take to close it.”
Solomons says we are living through history in its making. The last few years have seen court cases such as Mercedez von Cloete versus the minister of safety and security (2021), Digashu versus the government, Seiler-Lilles versus the government (2023) as well as Dausab versus the minister of justice (2024) affirm LGBTQI+ people’s constitutional and human rights.
Respectively, these cases relate to the assault of a transgender woman by a police officer, the recognition of same-sex marriages legally concluded abroad and include the challenging of the common law offences of sodomy and unnatural sexual offences as unconstitutional.
In the report, Solomons draws attention to a counter-movement in the wake of some of these rulings. This counter-movement includes Marriage Act 14 of 2024, signed but not yet in force, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman and describes ‘sex’ as ‘biological sex assigned at birth’. Solomons says this language legally erases transgender identity.
“Section 44 of the Civil Registration and Identification Act 13 of 2024 reinforces this exclusion. Both acts were a direct legislative response to the Digashu ruling,” says Solomons.
“We have shown very big judicial victories, but they can be reversed very quickly by legislation that moves faster, with more determination, with hate, than the courts,” Solomons says. “Progress and regression have not really coexisted. They have accelerated one another. That is the central tension that this report is looking at.”
While ‘Not Yet Uhuru’ brings these landmark rulings and their aftermath into focus, the report also includes sections on the colonial origins of discriminatory laws and situates the legal landscape in its social and political context.
Additional sections reflect on tolerance without protection, the politics of disgust, the cost of legal impunity and on global counter-movements. The report also identifies current legal gaps, examines civil society and prioritises a number of recommendations to achieve the full recognition and protection of Namibia’s LGBTQI+ people’s human and constitutional rights.
“The freedom fighters who built this nation did not intend a republic in which some citizens live in the house and others sleep in the yard,” says Solomons. “Not yet uhuru. But the work is unfinished, not abandoned.”
By Namibian.
