THIRD SECTOR &COMMUNITY
PATH AHEAD
Namibian LGBTQ+ activist Friedel Dausab scored a major win by getting Namibia’s colonial-era laws impacting gay men overturned last year. But, as he says here, there’s still much work to be done
Words Alastair James
On 21 June 2024, Friedel Dausab, a gay rights activist from Tsumeb, O Namibia, scored a big victory when the country’s High Court overturned colonial-era laws that penalised ‘sodomy’ and ‘unnatural sexual offences’.
Dausab had gone to the High Court to fight for the laws to be declared unconstitutional, saying that they discriminated against gay men in Namibia. Ruling in Dausab’s favour, the Namibian High Court stated that criminalisation of same-sex relations between consenting men “is outweighed by the harmful and prejudicial impact it has on gay men and that its retention in our law is thus not reasonably justifiable in a democratic society”. In finding the laws — whose origins date back nearly 500 years to England’s 1533 Buggery Act — unconstitutional, the court said, “The finding of unconstitutionality leads to only one conclusion, namely to declare the impugned laws invalid.”