AHRC Submits a Memo to Ghana's Parliament Challenging Impending Anti-LGBTI Legislation from Forced Displacement Perspective
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Melanie Nathan, March 14, 2026.
Ghana’s Parliament is once again considering the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, commonly referred to as the Family Values Bill (FVB). The proposed legislation seeks to significantly expand existing criminal penalties related to same-sex relationships and would introduce new offenses related to identity, expression, advocacy, and association involving lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender-diverse people. The bill also includes provisions requiring individuals to report suspected LGBTQ persons and contains an extradition clause intended to extend its reach beyond Ghana’s borders.
The legislation was previously passed by Parliament in 2024 but did not come into force after the President had not attested to it before the parliamentary term ended. The bill has now been reintroduced, and Parliament has invited submissions from the public and civil society as part of its review process.
In response to this call, the African Human Rights Coalition (AHRC) has submitted a Memorandum to the Committee on Constitutional and Legal Affairs of the Parliament of Ghana in commenting on the legislation. Drawing on many years of documenting displacement and persecution affecting LGBTQ people across Africa, the submission examines the human consequences of legislation that criminalizes identity and the ways in which such laws contribute to forced displacement and asylum claims around the world.
Rather than engaging the bill solely as a legal or political question, the submission focuses on the experiences of those most affected by it: the Ghanaian citizens who are forced to leave their homes when laws and social climates make it impossible for them to live safely in their own country.
For many of the Ghanaians whose stories inform this submission, becoming a refugee was never part of their life plan. They were students, teachers, professionals, artists, and young people deeply connected to their families and communities. Their journeys into exile often began not with a single dramatic event, but with a gradual closing of space in which they could safely exist: family rejection, public humiliation, beatings, sexual violence, police harassment, and the constant fear that their identity could expose them to arrest or mob violence. When laws frame a group of citizens as criminals simply for who they are, the result is rarely silence or disappearance. Instead, people run. They leave their homes, their families, and the only country they have ever known in search of safety elsewhere.
HERE IS THE SUBMISSION IN PDF FORM - attached to this Report, entitled : When Laws Create Refugees:
A Reflection on Ghana’s Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill
*** Some Noteworthy Excerpts *** "Human sexuality is not an act, nor merely a behavior that a person chooses or performs. It is an aspect of identity—part of who a person is. The language of the proposed legislation itself implicitly recognizes this. By criminalizing those who “hold out” as LGBTQ, the bill acknowledges that identity exists beyond any particular act. "
***************
Over many years, through the work of the African Human Rights Coalition, I have documented the experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and gender-nonconforming Ghanaians who are forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in other countries. Their stories are not abstract policy discussions. They are testimonies of people whose lives are already profoundly shaped by Ghana’s existing criminal laws and by the social climate those laws produce. The repeated proposal of harsher legislation—such as the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill (FVB)—has itself intensified hostility, emboldened persecution, and deepened fear within communities. Should this law be enacted, those harms will not merely continue; they will be formally reinforced and significantly exacerbated.
*****************
To declare that such diversity is “un-African” is therefore not merely a cultural claim—=, it is effectively to declare that a part of humanity itself does not belong within the culture. The practical consequence of that assertion is that a segment of Ghana’s own citizens, its sons, daughters, students, teachers, artists, and professionals—are treated as outsiders within their own society.
******************
Those who flee do not disappear. They reappear in asylum systems across the world, where they rebuild their lives in new societies. In the process, Ghana loses its own citizens, while other nations gain their talent, labor, creativity, and futures.
*********************
The global asylum system offers protection only to a fraction of those who are forced to flee. Refugee resettlement programs are limited, asylum procedures are lengthy and uncertain, and many individuals spend years in legal and humanitarian limbo before their claims are resolved. In practice, legislation that forces people to flee often pushes them not toward safety, but toward dangerous and unpredictable journeys in search of it.
In this way, laws that criminalize identity do not simply affect life within national borders. They contribute directly to patterns of international displacement, placing already vulnerable individuals into migration pathways that are fraught with risk and uncertainty.
*********************
There is another path available, one that preserves faith, culture, and sovereignty while avoiding the displacement of citizens. It is a path grounded in the recognition that sexual orientation, like many aspects of human identity, exists across all societies and throughout history. The presence of such diversity does not weaken a nation. What weakens a nation is when some of its citizens must flee simply to live safely.
Comments