Senegal’s Prime Minister, Ousmane Sonko, has launched a fierce rhetorical attack on Western nations, accusing a “small nucleus” of international powers of attempting to force LGBTQ values onto the West African country.
Addressing the National Assembly, Sonko firmly defended the state’s controversial new legal framework, which dramatically intensifies punishments against the country’s LGBTQ community despite intense backlash from global human rights watchdogs.
“There is a kind of tyranny at play,” Sonko declared during his parliamentary speech. “Out of eight billion people in the world, a tiny Western minority is leveraging its vast financial resources and media monopoly to impose its lifestyle choices on everyone else.”
Inside Senegal’s New 10-Year Jail Penalties
The hardened legislative amendments, which officially went into effect following a presidential sign-off, represent a massive escalation in the country’s long-standing legal ban on same-sex relationships.
Key details of the newly enacted laws include:
Doubled Jail Time: The maximum prison sentence for consensual same-sex acts has been aggressively scaled up from five years to 10 years.
Crackdown on Funding: The law introduces strict criminal penalties for individuals or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) found guilty of financing same-sex advocacy networks.
Ban on “Glorification”: It outlaws what the state defines as the public promotion, support, or glorification of “unnatural acts,” severely restricting local media and human rights groups.
Global Human Rights Bodies Sound the Alarm
The statutory shift has sparked immediate condemnation from international diplomatic circles.
Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, had previously made direct appeals to the Senegalese presidency to block the bill. Türk warned that the policy opens the floodgates for severe hate crimes, blackmail, systemic discrimination, and arbitrary arrests across the country.
The legislative overhaul coincides with a sharp rise in police operations targeting sexual minorities in Dakar and other urban hubs. Earlier this year, a high-profile raid in the capital led to the arrest of 12 men, including local media personalities, drawing sharp rebukes from Human Rights Watch.
With this latest move, Senegal joins a growing list of African nations reinforcing strict anti-homosexuality laws, contributing to a global landscape where over 60 nations currently criminalize same-sex intimacy.
- Al Jazeera