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By Dr Kitalikibi Abrahams
Who are minorities under international law?
The term minority as used in the United Nations human rights system usually refers to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, pursuant to the United Nations Minorities Declaration. The Declaration was inspired by Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is the most widely accepted legally binding provision on minorities.
Basing on the United Nations definition of a minority group, where do the LGBTQ belong? For example homosexuality is not an ethnic group,not a religion and not a language??? According to the above definition, a minority group is defined basing on the three parameters!!
Those advocating for the rights of LGBTQ have been categorizing them as a minority group. We have to appreciate the fact that world over, there exist a great number of categories of people who are minority because of their uniqueness based on certain differences compared to what the majority are, in that very society.
For example smokers, infertile men and women, the deaf, the lame, musicians, footballers etc . People who belong to these groups are few and some of them have been restricted in what they want to be and do ;e.g smokers have been restricted from smoking in public by certain laws.
So, if the USA and other nations are so much interested in rights for every minority group, why have they enacted laws against public smoking to restrict the smoker who is also a minority person!!! Why are they not talking about the rights of the minority lame, deaf, infertile etc since all these are minority groups and desire to live in a certain way!!! Why have these nations singled out the LGBTQ of all the minority groupings on earth???
Adopted by consensus in 1992, the purpose of the United Nations Minorities Declaration is the promotion and protection of the rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities and as such to contribute to the political and social stability of States in which they live.
There is no internationally agreed definition as to who is a minority. The existence of a minority is a question of fact and carries both objective factors (such as the existence of a shared ethnicity, language or religion) and subjective factors (including that individuals must identify themselves as belonging to a national or ethnic, religious or linguistic minority group).
And if I may ask, what moral authority does the USA, other countries and any individual person have to dictate the definition of what a human right is, and a minority group ; to a sovereign state like Uganda?? Even if there is an obligation of being in harmony with internationally agreed standards of such definitions; in a situation where we realize that the internationally set definition has weaknesses in consideration of our values as a country; are we supposed to uphold such a definition if it’s permitting what we call evil as a country??
According to Sociologist Louis Wirth, 1945 ,a minority group is “any group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment, and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination.”.
If I may also base on the definition of sociologist Louis Wirth, where do the LGBTQ fall? Is homosexuality a physical characteristic or a culture?
In my view, if homosexual are a minority group; they decided to shift from the majority group (where a man is for a woman)where they previously belonged because of reasons known to them. So, in the context of Uganda, homosexuals cannot bother the majority to protect them in what the majority call evil and also allow them to spread it.
If we allow these misled individuals, it may create a bad precedence for the future, such that every group that is regarded as minority and marginalized will want laws to protect them e.g thieves, killers ,sex workers etc. So, what kind of society shall we end up with??
We have to appreciate the fact that we shall never have rights for every grouping called” minority ” in every country.
We have also to accept that what one nation calls a human right, it is a human wrong in the other basing on the uniqueness in what they call national values .But of course there exists crosscutting values which we should base on to have internationally accepted human rights.
Therefore the USA and some individuals shouldn’t try to force Uganda to accept what we call a human wrong for a human right.
The Writer is a Ugandan and the president at Kadosh Christian Ministries -Uganda
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