A Ghana court denied bail Tuesday to 21 LGBTQ+ activists arrested during a crackdown on the country’s marginalized queer and trans community.
16 women and five men have remained in prison following the May 20 police raid, in which law enforcement officials detained people gathering for a peaceful workshop about reporting human rights violations. While advocating for LGBTQ+ equality is not illegal in Ghana, a spokesperson said police took offense with materials disseminated at the meeting, which included pamphlets entitled “Coming Out” and “All About Trans.”
“[T]here is an agenda by these people to propagate the LGBTQ behavior,” a representative for the Volta Regional Police Command told the Ghana news site MyJoyOnline. “For now, we have referred the preliminary charge of unlawful assembly and while we continue our investigation.”
Advocates were hopeful the prisoners would be released after being previously denied bail in May, a decision they appealed. Their hearing was scheduled for Friday but was met with a delay.
Ultimately, Reuters reported that their appeal met the same fate, with a court in the Ghanan city of Ho refusing the bail application once more. According to the international news wire service, several of the detainees “were seen weeping after the ruling” was announced on Tuesday.
While Julia Selman Ayetey, an attorney for the LGBTQ+ activists, did not disclose the grounds of the denial to the press, she has previously noted the irony of the circumstances. “We cannot condone a situation where people attend a workshop on rights only to be arrested and have those very human rights they were learning about be trampled upon,” Ayetey told SouthAfrican newspaper Business Day earlier this year.
The ruling is only the most recent blow to Ghana’s LGBTQ+ community, which has been under frequent attack in recent months. A resource center operated by LGBT+ Rights Ghana was raided and forced to shut down in February, just weeks after it opened.
“We did not expect such an uproar,” said Alex Kofi Donkor, director of LGBT+ Rights Ghana, told Reuters at the time. “We expected some homophobic organizations would use the opportunity to exploit the situation and stoke tension against the community, but the anti-gay hateful reaction has been unprecedented.”
In the aftermath of the center’s closure, Ghanaian lawmakers have called to strengthen the penalties targeting the country’s LGBTQ+ community. Same-sex relations are already illegal under Ghana’s colonial-era sodomy laws and punishable by up to three years in prison, but a new bill proposed in March would criminalize “both the act and the advocacy” of homosexuality.
Should that bill be signed into law, workshops like the one the LGBTQ+ detainees were arrested for attending would become explicitly illegal.
Meanwhile, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo Addo has further fanned the flames of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment by vowing in a February speech that his administration would never back marriage equality. “I have said it before, and let me stress it again, that it will not be under the presidency of Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo that same-sex marriage will be legal,” he told a cheering audience.
Despite the many challenges they face, LGBTQ+ advocates are going to keep fighting. LGBT+ Rights Ghana is currently crowdfunding to open a new community center and has raised over $46,000 toward its $100,000 goal.
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