International rights group, the Human Rights Watch (HRW), has accused Cameroonian security forces of serial abuse against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people and not protecting them from violent attacks but instead embark on massive raids where they are arrested.
HRW which made the accusation in a report on Saturday, said there has been an upsurge in violence and abuse against LGBTI people in Cameroon as authorities continue to arrest and detain them or anyone suspected to be an LGBTI person.
Ilaria Allegrozzi, the HRW Central African Researcher who authored the report, said “Cameroon police are failing to protect LGBTI people from mob violence, conducting arbitrary arrests and detentions, perpetrating violence against LGBTI people and failing to bring perpetrators of mob violence on LGBTI people to book.”
“The law criminalizing same-sex relations is a repressive, draconian backward law which does not only violate Cameroon’s obligation under national and international laws, but also contributes to create a climate of violence, to institutionalize an atmosphere of hate against LGBTI people,” Allegrozzi said.
“And the criminalization of same-sex conduct renders LGBTI people vulnerable to violence at the hands of ordinary citizens as well as law enforcement officials,” he added.
The HRW report cited a case on April 10 where a crowd of about eight men armed with machetes, knives, sticks, and wooden planks, attacked a group of LGBTI people attending a party at a private home in Messassi, a neighborhood in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde.
HRW said in the report that a local official took two of the victims to gendarmeries for protection from the mob but that the gendarmes beat and humiliated the LGBTI persons and released them after a $24 bribe was paid.
But a legal practitioner and a member of the Cameroon Bar Council,
Shashan Mbinglo, has countered the HRW by saying same-sex relations in the central African country has been criminalised and therefore an offense.
“They (HRW) will say our law is discriminatory, unfair but they forget that our laws are founded not just on principles of justice, fairness, equality as obtains globally, but on traditions and customs peculiar to us.
“The laws do not permit, the laws do not accommodate, the laws are against what the LGBTI stand for. Most of them (LGBTI persons) think it is normal to come out on social media forgetting that they expose themselves to assault and attacks,” Mbinglo said.
Under the Cameroonian laws, anyone found guilty of engaging in same-sex relations risk up to five years in prison if convicted.