Thu 12 May 2016 In: International News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Germany is preparing to overturn the convictions of gay men who were convicted of having homosexual sex before 1994 when same-sex intimacy was decriminalised. The German justice minister says the historical convictions are "wrong... they are deeply hurtful to human dignity.” “Homosexual men who were convicted should no longer have to live with the stain of a criminal record," he added. Homosexuality was partially decriminalised in East Germany in 1968 and in West Germany in 1969, but there were a further 3,500 convictions before the law was finally repealed in 1994. A campaign to have historical convictions in New Zealand wiped from the records has yet to bear fruit, with Minister of Justice Amy Adams saying as recently as January this year that “its impossible to tell whether they involved consensual acts or not after the event, because of the way the law was written.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Thursday, 12th May 2016 - 10:45pm