Forbidden : Institutionalizing Discrimination Against Gays and Lesbians in Burundi

On April 22, 2009, the president of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, signed into law a new criminal code that contains a provision making sexual relations between people of the same sex illegal for the first time in the country's history. From November 2008, when the National Assembly first passed the discriminatory law, through May 2009, shortly after the criminal code was promulgated, Human Rights Watch carried out in-depth interviews with 16 members of Burundi's LGBT community, all of them young people between 17 and 37. We spoke to them about their childhoods, about when and how they first realized they were gay or lesbian, and about how this identity affected their lives. They told us heartbreaking stories of being beaten by parents, chased out of their family homes, threatened by police officers, silenced in school, and subjected to sexual violence. The abuses and discrimination they endured, for which they felt they had no protection from the state, made them second-class citizens in Burundi long before the passage of article 567. Human Rights Watch teamed up with photographer Martina Bacigalupo to create portraits of ten of these young people, many of whom feel that their very identities have been rendered criminal by Burundi's new law. In these pages, they are allowed to speak for themselves.