June 27, 2019
Wall joins global effort on LGBTI rights
MP Louisa Wall says laws against homosexuality are part of colonialist oppression and it's in the interests of indigenous peoples to see the end of them.
Ms Wall has just got back from the United Nations in New York where she talked about LGBT rights.
She says there are 70 countries which still have laws against same sex relationships, including 11 where the penalty is death.
She says she was proud to be part of launching a campaign for global reform, especially as she was able to put a Māori perspective that anti-homosexuality laws in Aotearoa came from the arrival of British missionaries and British laws.
"Up to that point we didn't have any criminalisation of our LGBTI whānau. Based on our whakapapa, takatāpui were part of our whānau and we didn't have to worry about issues such of this so it really is a remnant of colonisation and from an indigenous perspective it isn't part of our thinking to have excluded anybody," Ms Wall says.
The latest country to have decriminalised homosexuality was Botswana, where the courts found anti-LGBTI laws were in breach of its constitutional guarantees of equality.
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