Burkina Faso bans homosexuality, levying fines and up to 5 years in prison

Burkina Faso's military junta has banned homosexuality three years after overthrowing the nation's former government.

The 71 unelected members of the junta parliament approved the law Monday, which now awaits the signature of President Ibrahim Traoré, a former army captain who seized power after two coups in 2022. The specifics of the ban have not been revealed — whether it applies to same-sex sexual relations or any LGBTQ+ identity broadly.

“The law provides for a prison sentence ranging from two to five years and a fine,” Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala announced on state television Monday night, as reported by multiple outlets. “A person who [engages in] homosexual practices ... will appear before a judge and, in the event of a repeat offense, be deported if you are not a Burkinabe national."

While LGBTQ+ identities are not widely accepted in the nation, they were not previously outlawed. The ban comes as part of the junta's overhaul of marriage laws after usurping power from the country's former military ruler, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba. Human Rights Watch has previously said the 2022 military coup in Burkina Faso was "responsible for serious abuses, further degrading [the country's] human rights and humanitarian situation."

There are nearly twice as many countries that criminalize homosexuality than countries that have marriage equality. Over five dozen countries (61) have laws making same-sex sexual relations illegal. Most of them are in Africa, with the majority inheriting their laws from European colonization. Those colonial laws remain in place even after the countries that implemented them overturned them, though they're not always actively enforced. Punishments range from fines and imprisonment to the death penalty.

While many countries have decriminalized same-sex relationships in recent years, others have instead enacted legislation where there previously was none criminalizing them. Uganda lawmakers passed what has been dubbed one of the world's harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws last year in 2023, and Ghana advanced a draconian LGBTQ+ criminalization bill in spite of warnings from other nations and world financial institutions.