The homophobic law adopted by the Ghanaian Parliament in 2024 had expired due to the president’s failure to sign before the end of the legislature. That notwithstanding, Accra’s parliament has again voted it through.
Same player, still in the game. The Parliament of Ghana has once again adopted, this Friday May 29, a hardline anti-LGBT law tightening the crackdown on homosexuality in this English-speaking West African country with a Christian majority. The text had already been passed by Parliament in February 2024 (unanimously), but the former president Nana Akufo-Addo, who was in office until January 7, 2024, did not sign it, which made a new review necessary under the terms of the Constitution. His successor, John Dramani Mahama, of Pentecostal persuasion (a branch of evangelical Christianity), stated from his campaign his support for the bill.
“Against nature”
Since the country’s independence, achieved in 1957, Ghanaian law has always prohibited homosexuality. Under British rule, colonial law already proscribed the “unnatural sexual relations”, a notion echoed in section 104 of the Criminal Offences Act adopted in 1960. The new text, which bears “on sexual rights and family values”, tightens the penalties, providing up to three years of imprisonment for a person who has had homosexual relations, and between three and five years for the “promotion, sponsorship or deliberate support of LGBT+ activities”. Derogations to this second point are only provided for journalists, lawyers and health professionals acting in the exercise of their duties.
This vote comes in a context of a resurgence of political homophobia in various African countries, under pressure notably from religious authorities (Christian or Muslim) and under the pretext of defending African “values” against the West. In East Africa, Uganda voted in 2023 one of the continent’s most repressive laws, providing the death penalty in case of recurrence. Closer to Ghana, the junta in power in Burkina Faso adopted in September 2025 a text providing up to five years of imprisonment for the “authors of homosexual practices”. And Senegal has been plunged for more than two months into a sweeping anti-LGBT crackdown after the March vote to tighten the penalties for relations “against nature”.
