Uganda Sees Financial Backlash From Anti-Gay Law [View all]

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Uganda Sees Financial Backlash From Anti-Gay Law

By Hayes Brown

The World Bank on Thursday announced that it would be indefinitely delaying $90 million worth of loans to Uganda, the largest repercussion yet to President Yoseri Museveni signing a bill earlier this week that threatens life in jail for Ugandan gays...Museveni ignored criticism from the United States and signed the bill, which aside from making homosexual behavior punishable by up to life in prison, bans all advocacy on LGBT issues. The law also provides incentives for citizens to turn in associates who are gay and declares that performing a same-sex marriage carries a sentence of seven years in prison. While the United States’ response has been mostly rhetorical in nature, pending an “internal review,” the World Bank chose to move forward with consequences on Thursday evening.

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The World Bank has historically shied away from intervening in its client’s politics since its founding in 1944, leaving internal issues in the hands of their patrons and reform demands to fellow financial institution the International Monetary Fund (IMF). That seems to be changing under World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, formerly president of Dartmouth College. Kim emailed his staff shortly before the announcement was made, telling them “acts of discrimination against a group of people because of their sexual orientation cannot be tolerated.”

For the general public, Kim penned an opinion piece that ran at the Washington Post on Thursday, calling his own experience with discrimination growing up in Iowa “trifling indignities compared with the discrimination that many people around the world face based solely on their sex, age, race or sexual orientation.” He went on to call out the large number of countries that institutionalize discrimination — 81 around the world that criminalize homosexuality and more than 100 that discriminate against women.

“Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies,” he wrote. “At the World Bank Group, we will have a full internal discussion over the coming months about discrimination more broadly and how it would affect our projects and our gay and lesbian staff members. My view is that the fight to eliminate all institutionalized discrimination is an urgent task.”

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http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/02/28/3345341/uganda-lgbt-world-bank/