LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya are victims of severe hate crimes and abuses, including rape, a report released yesterday by Amnesty International and a Nairobi-based gay rights group said.
Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya hosts more than 200,000 refugees and asylum seekers, including hundreds of LGBTQ people who experience “extreme discrimination and violence,” Amnesty and the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission said.
Perpetrators are able to “commit their crimes with almost total impunity, enabled by inaction on the part of the authorities,” they added.
Photo: AP
Researchers interviewed 41 people from 2018 to February who described facing “hate crimes, violence, including rape, and other serious human rights abuses.”
Esther, a 41-year-old lesbian, told researchers that she was raped twice in 2018 in the camp, the first time by two men threatening her with a knife, and the second time by four men during a burglary “in the presence of her seven-year-old son.”
Another lesbian, Winnie, said her shop was destroyed by vandals who also injured one of her children.
She said that police had done little to help her apprehend those responsible.
Such incidents showed that the camp, which is run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, was “not yet safe for asylum seekers and refugees” who are LGBTQ, the report said.
The community faces “discrimination as well as homophobic and transphobic attitudes from government officials, the police and other service providers,” Amnesty executive director for Kenya Irungu Houghton said.
“This is often reflected in delays to the processing of their asylum claims, harassment, violent homophobic attacks, threats, intimidation and extremely limited opportunities for local integration or third-country resettlement,” Houghton said.
The Kenyan government must “urgently ensure the physical and psychological safety” of all LGBTQ asylum seekers and refugees in the Kakuma camp, the report said.
The report comes as the LGBTQ community finds itself under attack in Kenya and neighboring countries, with governments and politicians taking an increasingly harsh line on same-sex activity.
Kenyan President William Ruto, a born-again Christian elected in August last year, in March said that same-sex marriages could “happen in other countries, but not in Kenya.”
Homosexuality is a Western import that Kenya’s “customs, traditions, Christianity and Islam cannot allow,” he said.
Gay sex is a crime under colonial-era laws in the East African nation. Penalties include prison terms of up to 14 years.
However, Kenya is the only nation in East Africa and the Horn region to offer “asylum to individuals who seek protection because of their sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression and sex characteristics,” the report said.
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has
SCIENTIFIC TREASURE: Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system, the samples would help scientists better understand how the Earth and life formed NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space on Sunday parachuted into the Utah desert to cap a seven-year journey. In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 100,000km out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the ship set off after another asteroid. “We have touchdown,” mission recovery operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials later said the orange striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated — at about 6,100m — basing it on the deceleration rate. To everyone’s relief, the
COP28 AGENDA: Beijing’s climate envoy said that China was open to negotiating a global renewable energy target as long as it took economic conditions into account The complete phasing-out of fossil fuels is not realistic, China’s top climate official said on Thursday, adding that such fuels must continue to play a vital role in maintaining global energy security. Chinese Special Envoy on Climate Change Xie Zhenhua (解振華) was responding to comments by ambassadors at a forum in Beijing ahead of the UN’s COP28 climate meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in November. Reporters obtained a copy of text of Xie’s speech and a video recording of the meeting. Countries are under pressure to make more ambitious climate pledges after a UN-led global “stocktake” said that 20 gigatonnes of additional
The son of jailed Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai (黎智英) on Wednesday said that he did not want to see his father die in detention, as his lawyers raised the prospect that his long-delayed trial might be pushed back indefinitely. Sebastien Lai (黎崇恩) also said that the British government was “shameful” for its lack of action in helping his father, who is a British national. Jimmy Lai, the 75-year-old founder of Hong Kong’s now-defunct Apple Daily, has been in detention since he was arrested in 2020 under a National Security Law imposed by Beijing. The Hong Kong businessman faces up to life