135 votes for. Zero against. A campaign promise kept. And a country that was already criminalising homosexuality now doing so with new ferocity while the UN warns that sacrosanct human rights are being trampled and activists report arrests happening almost daily.
Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye signed the legislation Monday and it appeared in the official journal Tuesday morning. By the time the country’s citizens opened their newspapers, the law was already in force. A bill that doubled the maximum prison term for same-sex relations from five to ten years, criminalised the “promotion” of homosexuality, imposed jail time on anyone who finances support for LGBTQ+ people, and raised fines to levels that would financially destroy most ordinary Senegalese citizens was now the law of the land.
The law punishes “acts against nature” the phrase used in Senegal’s penal code to signify same-sex relations by five to ten years’ imprisonment, compared with one to five years previously. It also provides for three to seven years in prison for those found guilty of promoting or financing same-sex relationships.
As well as increasing prison sentences, the law allows for fines of up to 10 million CFA francs around £13,000 upholding Faye’s promise in 2024 to criminalise homosexuality more severely.
UN rights chief Volker Türk called the law “deeply worrying” after its passage in parliament and said that it “flies in the face of the sacrosanct human rights” the rights to respect, dignity, privacy, equality and freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.
The government dismissed the international criticism, arguing that the measures reflected the views of Senegalese people. And in one sense, the parliamentary vote supports that claim entirely: the new law was passed by an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly on 11 March, with 135 MPs voting in favour, none against, and three abstaining.
The legislation was a campaign promise of President Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, both of whom had pledged to deliver a tougher anti-LGBT law while on the campaign trail in 2024.
Sonko widely regarded as the more ideologically forceful of the two and the political architect of their Pastef movement had been particularly explicit. Before becoming Senegal’s highly influential prime minister in 2024, Sonko had promised to make same-sex relations a crime, upping the offence from its current classification as misdemeanour. It was Sonko himself who presented the new bill to parliament.
Supporters of the bill, including lawmakers from the ruling Pastef party, organised a demonstration in Dakar in which participants shouted “No to homosexuality!” and held signs with rainbows crossed out.
The bill was taken to parliament after a wave of arrests over alleged same-sex relationships, which were already banned under Senegalese law and MPs had twice previously, in 2022 and 2024, unsuccessfully sought to raise jail terms and penalties. This time, under a government that had explicitly campaigned on delivering exactly this legislation, the parliamentary arithmetic was entirely different.
Religious associations in the Muslim-majority West African country had staged demonstrations to demand tougher penalties, with Imami Babacar Sylla, the leader of And Samm Jikko Yi a network of Islamic and civil society organisations urging Faye to sign the bill as quickly as possible. “The longer it takes, the more complicated it will be. And these people, whom I consider a public danger, will continue to escape,” Sylla said.
What makes the new law particularly alarming to human rights observers is not just the doubled prison terms for consensual same-sex relations. It is the extraordinary breadth of what is now criminalised.
The measure criminalises “apology” for same-sex relations, allowing authorities to prosecute not only those who “promote” or finance events encouraging homosexuality, but also anyone who expresses support for LGBTQ people or favourable opinions about LGBTQ rights.
Judges would be barred from granting suspended sentences or reducing prison terms below the new minimum sentence, which was increased from one year to five years. The mandatory minimum sentencing provision removes judicial discretion entirely meaning no judge can show mercy even if they want to.
The law specifies that “acts against nature” relate to homosexuality, bisexuality, “transsexuality”, zoophilia and necrophilia effectively placing homosexuality in the same legal category as bestiality and sexual acts on corpses. The deliberate grouping is not accidental. It is a legal statement of equivalence designed to maximise social stigma.
And perhaps most chillingly of all, the prosecution net extends far beyond individuals in same-sex relationships: the new law criminalises any public representation and financial support by individuals or organisations for same-sex relationships — with three to seven years in prison for those found guilty. A lawyer who defends a gay client. An NGO that provides HIV services to gay men. A journalist who writes sympathetically about LGBTQ+ issues. Any of these could now theoretically face prosecution under Senegalese law.
Behind the legal architecture and the parliamentary vote lies the lived reality of the people the law targets and that reality was already deteriorating sharply before Faye signed the bill.
Reports suggest an increase in fear has led to some going into hiding after dozens of men were arrested since February. These arrests have often been based on phone searches, with cases reported almost daily and the names of those detained made public.
The practice of publicly naming detained individuals exposing their identities to families, employers, and communities is a form of social punishment that operates parallel to the legal system, creating consequences that extend far beyond whatever sentence a court might impose. In a society where family honour and community standing are central to daily life, public identification as gay can mean losing employment, housing, family support, and physical safety simultaneously.
Human Rights Watch noted a rise in “hostility toward LGBT people” in Senegal a trend that the new law will almost certainly accelerate. When the state signals, through doubled prison terms and zero parliamentary opposition, that a group of people are criminal by virtue of who they are, it grants permission implicitly if not explicitly to those who wish to harm them.
The international response to the legislation has been robust though, as Channels Television noted, somewhat more muted than the reaction to other recent anti-LGBTQ bills in Africa.
UN rights chief Türk was unequivocal. “The bill flies in the face of sacrosanct human rights we all enjoy: the rights to respect, dignity, privacy, equality and freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly.”
UNAIDS said it was “deeply concerned” by the bill and warned that criminalisation only “causes people to turn away from health services” such as those for HIV. This is not a theoretical concern. In environments where gay men and other LGBTQ+ people face legal jeopardy if they access healthcare, HIV testing rates fall, treatment interruptions increase, and public health outcomes for the entire population deteriorate. The law that Senegal’s government has presented as reflecting its values will cost lives not only through imprisonment, but through preventable disease.
LGBTQ rights group ILGA World had called on Faye not to sign the bill, urging him to uphold “respect for individual liberty and the human person.”
“Further tightening repression will only fuel violence, fear, and impunity,” said Drissa Traoré, the Secretary General of the International Federation for Human Rights. “Senegalese authorities have an obligation to protect all persons without discrimination, not to designate scapegoats.”
The Senegalese government, for its part, has dismissed all of it framing the international criticism as precisely the kind of Western imposition that the legislation itself is designed to resist.
Senegal’s new law does not exist in isolation. It is the latest chapter in a continental legislative trend that has been accelerating across sub-Saharan Africa for several years a trend that human rights organisations are watching with deepening alarm.
In September last year, Burkina Faso’s transitional parliament approved a bill banning homosexual acts, following its neighbour Mali in 2024. In 2023, Uganda voted in some of the world’s harshest anti-homosexual legislation, meaning that people engaging in same-sex relationships can be sentenced to death in certain circumstances. Ghana is also planning to re-introduce an anti-homosexual bill that activists say threatens basic human rights, safety and freedom.
Approximately 10 countries or territories impose sentences ranging from 10 years to life in prison, including Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Sierra Leone.
The pattern is clear: across West Africa in particular, governments that came to power on platforms of social conservatism, Islamic identity, and pan-African resistance to Western values are legislating on LGBTQ+ issues as a way of signalling cultural sovereignty and domestic ideological legitimacy.
Reuters reported this month that Senegalese proponents of the bill discussed campaign strategy and mobilisation tactics with a US-based “pro-family” group that calls homosexuality a public health threat a detail that complicates the “resistance to Western influence” narrative considerably. The anti-LGBTQ legislation that Senegal’s government frames as Senegalese values asserting themselves against Western imposition was, at least in part, shaped by collaboration with American religious conservative organisations.
The most difficult dimension of this story the one that resists easy resolution is the genuine tension between two principles that both command respect.
The first is self-determination: Senegal is a sovereign nation whose government was democratically elected, whose parliament voted with near unanimity, and whose religious and civil society institutions have demonstrated consistent popular support for this legislation. The argument that Western human rights frameworks should simply override what an African country’s citizens and their representatives have chosen is not an argument that can be made without acknowledging its own uncomfortable history of external imposition.
The second is universality: human rights the right to dignity, privacy, freedom from persecution based on who you are are not Western inventions. They are human. The argument that cultural sovereignty permits the state to imprison people for consensual adult relationships is not an argument that can be made without acknowledging that the people being imprisoned are Senegalese too, with rights that do not disappear because their government finds their identity inconvenient.
Read Also: Sierra Leone Ambassador Bids Farewell to Senegalese President After Six-Year Tenure.
Both arguments deserve to be heard. Neither makes the other disappear. And somewhere in Dakar tonight and in every other city and town in Senegal there are people whose lives have become considerably more dangerous since Monday, not because they have harmed anyone, but because of who they are.
The law is signed. The fines are set. The prison terms are doubled. And the human cost of this legislation is only beginning to be counted.
