David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the distinguished ambassadress but will ask her some questions she may find challenging. She spoke about hate speech and outlawing it under the Abuja Accord but from the reading I have done, everything she has said about Boko Haram would be felt by gay people in Nigeria about the Government, given the publication, passing and signing into law by President Goodluck Jonathan of anti-same sex marriage legislation, the outlawing of sexual behaviour, the outlawing of transgender and transsexual people, and the severe criminal penalties involved in all this. I have a headline here that says, "You thought it was tough being gay in Uganda. 'It's hell in Nigeria.'" It remains curious to me, and I wonder if the ambassador has a response, why the Nigerian Government would support legislation that had its origin in 16th and 19th century British imperial statutes. That seems an odd situation.

It would be one thing if this were just a question of human rights - people can take different views on human rights and people have said that one person can say this is a violation of human rights and another can say it is supporting morality and the family and all the rest of it - but there are very practical results from this. I spoke on this in India, when I was at one of the Inter-Parliamentary Union meetings, because at that stage they were clamping down on gay people. That creates a time-bomb with regard to the situation of AIDS. The Nigerian Government's own figures show that HIV prevalence among gay men is 17.2%, whereas it is 4.1% among the general population. If the Government smothers that up, if it terrifies people, if it bullies, harasses, intimidates, jails, beats and stones people, of course they will go underground and the AIDS situation will get worse all the time. That is a simple, observable, objective fact. Why does the ambassador think that a country like Ireland should support AIDS programmes in Nigeria when the policies of its Government are going in the opposite direction and are likely to lead to a considerable increase in the numbers of people with AIDS?

There are therefore two aspects to this. One is the very human situation of a downtrodden group of people, a minority who have been terrified, beaten, attacked and imprisoned for something over which they have no control. In the past couple of days, our Parliament has been discussing the Gender Recognition Bill. This is something which would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago. Yet people who are transvestite are subject to severe penal codes in Nigeria. There are therefore two aspects to this - one is the existence of the criminal law and the second is the question of the impact of this unwise legislation on the situation regarding AIDS.