President of The Gambia Yahya Jammeh, who in mid-May reportedly threatened to expel or behead lesbian and gay people the country, should fully retract his comments, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the President on 10 June.
President Jammeh has retracted his threat to kill homosexual people, but not the threat to expel them, the HRW statement said. His comments, which HRW says were made in a speech in May, "encourage hatred... [and] contribute to a climate in which basic rights can be assaulted with impunity". Scott Long, director of HRW's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Programme said: "It is very dangerous when political leaders turn to homophobic statements to try to drum up political support. When statements like this are made, violence often follows - sometimes immediately and sometimes further down the line. It makes people think these are people that it is safe to attack," Long told IRIN in a telephone interview from New York.
In the letter to President Jammeh, HRW's Juliana Cano Nieto, a researcher with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Programme said, "Neither religion nor culture can justify calls to mob violence and murder."
Gambia: Mob Violence And Murder Feared After President's Gay ...
AllAfrica.com, Washington
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