The lack of knowledge about the laws and operations of Malawi’s legal system continues to fuel human rights abuse and injustices towards LGBTQ community members. The LGBTQ people in the country have been normalizing human rights violations that they face in their everyday life including in their access to public services due to ignorance and fear of taking liable individuals to task. To reduce the knowledge gap on the same, ArtGlo with support from the Southern Africa Ligation Centre (SALC), conducted Legal Empowerment Workshops for LGBTQ community members in Salima, Mwanza, Mulanje, Thyolo, Balaka, and Zomba districts.
The workshops utilized participatory techniques through which it was revealed that a majority of the LGBTQ community members do not report cases of human rights violations. This propelled the Legal speaker, to highlight the laws pertaining same-sex relations in Malawi and also how the legal systems in the country operate. He emphasized on human rights to motivate them to challenge rampant human rights violations. Later, the participants discussed safety and security tactics to increase safety and promote healthy living in their communities. They further shared their some fascinating highlights about the engagements.
“The content comes at a pace whereby the information is not led at but rather comes in small bits which is very easy for us to grasp. Again, the layout of the activities is so coordinated and it allows us to relate what we are engaged in. For instance, the workshop starts with finding the problems we experience here and later resonates with legal interventions.” Elaborated one of the workshop participants in Zomba.
In Balaka, the participants could not hold their gratitude and explicitly told our Social Inclusion and Diversity (SID) team that they will no longer feign ignorance of the law as an excuse. They highlighted the engagement has capacitated and increased their level of knowledge regarding the laws of Malawi on homosexuality as well as how the justice systems work.
“The workshop has been eye-opening in the sense that we have discovered that we have been unnecessarily threatened by people on the grounds that we will be persecuted for being an LGBTQ person. We will no longer bow down to such threats as we have known that being an LGBTQ person is not prohibited but the practice of homosexuality is criminalized.” said one of the participants in Balaka.
Apart from enhancing their legal knowledge, participants in Mulanje described the workshop as a first of its kind and further assisted them in developing tactics to safeguard themselves and cope with threats arising from a negative public image. This is so because the engagements emphasized safety and security techniques to caution the already volatile environment, movement building, and allyship. This helped the LGBTI people recognize their power and the need to collaborate with their local community.
The workshops followed from the impact assessment of the ongoing constitutional case which revealed adverse repercussions for LGBTQ communities in Salima, Mwanza, Mulanje, Thyolo, Balaka, and Zomba districts. However, one of the participants in Mwanza highlighted the need there is a growing need to scale up the initiative to other LGBTQ communities. This will assist in transforming their misfortunes, ignite their abilities to defend their rights, and improve access to judicial services.
