A man who loved drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream was convicted by a Cameroon judge for ‘being a homosexual’.
Having same sex relations has been illegal in the African country since 1972 and anyone accused of doing so can be fined and even handed a prison term as long as five years.
Now a Cameroonian lawyer has lifted the lid on the country’s legal system after defending dozens of people he claims were accused of homosexuality.
Michel Togue claims hardly anyone is caught in the act of actually having sex so once an accusation of homosexuality is made, police use bizarre evidence based on stereotypes to convict them.
One such example was his client who was accused of having ‘feminine mannerisms’.
Mr Togue claims a judge convicted him on the basis that he drank Bailey’s Irish Cream, which he felt was a woman’s drink.
He told Think Progress that many of the accusations of homosexuality are made up by disgruntled neighbours, family members or even scorned former lovers.
Other examples of people being convicted include two women who had been in jail for 9 months after neighbours reported them – despite there being no evidence.
And three men arrested by police for allegedly having sex in a vehicle – they denied this – were convicted solely on the basis that they were dressed effeminately.
Mr Togue said: “To catch people having sex, to catch them in the act, you have to break the law. You have to violate their privacy, which is an offense.
“But the police will not focus on the offense of breaking the privacy of someone, but they will focus on the fact that they saw two people of the same gender having sex.”
He says most of the stigma around homosexuality is driven by religious sectors in the country.
In 2012, former Cameroon archbishop Simon-Victor Tonyé Bakot described homosexuality as a “shameful, a disrespectful criticism of God who has chosen to create man and woman.”
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Source: Mirror.co.uk