Bauchi Men Convicted Of Homosexuality Whipped

Four men, convicted of homosexuality, were whipped publicly yesterday in an Islamic court in Bauchi state, a human-rights activist said.
The four were among dozens arrested after the Federal Government strengthened its criminal penalties for homosexuality with the new Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in January.
“The men could face further violence in prison, if human rights organisations do not come up with an additional fine of N20,000 each, said Dorothy Aken’Ova of the Coalition for the Defence of Sexual Rights Network.
The four were sentenced to 15 strokes plus a year’s imprisonment, if they could not pay their fines.
Aken’Ova said the men, aged between 20 and 22, lay on the floor of the court to be whipped on their backs. The men’s families, mainly subsistence farmers in rural areas, refused an offer of legal representation because they preferred to negotiate with the judge and get the case behind them, said Aken’Ova.
She said the families were embarrassed by the stigma attached to homosexuality, which many religious Nigerians consider an evil imported from the West.
The hearings in Bauchi had been delayed from January, when a crowd tried to stone the accused outside the court and demanded the judge pass the death sentence.
Security officials had to fire into the air to save the men and disperse the crowd. Under Islamic sharia law in some northern states, homosexuals can be sentenced to death by stoning or lethal injection, though that sentence has never been enforced.
Aken’Ova, who got her information from the men’s families, said the judge was lenient because the men had promised that the homosexual acts occurred in the past and that they had since changed their ways.