Congo has no anti-gay law, but justice minister demands crackdown anyway

Moïse Manoël-Florisse, is an African-Caribbean online journalist keeping an eye…

Constant Mutamba had proposed an anti-gay bill when he was just a member of parliament.

Barely two weeks after Constant Mutamba took office as Justice Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, he ordered public prosecutors to prosecute homosexuals even though the country has no anti-gay law.

Accompanied by his muzzled mastiff, Constant Mutamba takes office as Minister of Justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo on May 29. (Photo courtesy of @info2kin).

In April, when Mutamba was nothing more than a member of parliament, he proposed a bill to criminalize same-sex intimacy, including prison sentences of up to 15 years.

He was promoted to Minister of State for Justice at the end of May and is putting pressure on the country’s judiciary to criminalize homosexuality extra-legally.

On June 15, in a letter to the Attorney General of the Kinshasa Court of Cassation, he demanded prosecutions “against the perpetrators of deviant practices of a sexual and homosexual nature”, mentioning “offences against morality” and against the nation’s moral order and its families. He provided no specifics of those allegations.

In addition, without explicitly naming anyone, Mutamba denounced the existence of LGBT+ organizations allegedly promoting “online orgies”, without providing any evidence..

Outraged by the facts that he himself claimed, he sent his letter with a copy to the Prime Minister’s office, the Minister of the Interior and the public prosecutors of the appeal courts, as well as the general commissioner of the national police, including the judicial police.

Legal challenges to anti-LGBTQ laws are under way in at least 10 nations

For the time being, there is no law in the DRC criminalizing homosexuality or trans-identity, and the legislative branch has not yet taken up the issue.

But the judiciary, whose independence is supposed to be guaranteed by the Congolese constitution, seems to be under threat, as are the nation’s LGBTQ communities.

In a telephone call just before this article was published, an LGBT+ rights activist reported that his house had been surrounded by police since yesterday evening. In despair, he said he wanted to kill himself.