"Not Yet Uhuru": A New Report Maps How Namibia's Courts and Parliament Are Pulling in Opposite Directions

“Uhuru” is Swahili for freedom, and it’s a word with real weight across southern and eastern Africa’s independence movements. “Not Yet Uhuru — Gender and LGBT Rights in Namibia: Opportunities, Gaps and Challenges” is the title of a report the Institute for Public Policy Research launched in May, and the title is the argument in miniature: Namibia’s LGBTQI+ community has won more in the last five years than almost anywhere else on the continent, and it still isn’t free in any way that’s settled or secure.

Written by independent human rights practitioner Abigail Solomons, the report’s central claim is worth sitting with: “Progress and regression have not really coexisted. They have accelerated one another.” Namibia isn’t a story of steady improvement or of straightforward backlash. It’s both, at the same time, each side responding directly to the other.

The court wins

The legal record Solomons documents is genuinely remarkable for the region. In Von Cloete v. Minister of Safety and Security, courts addressed the assault of a transgender woman in a way that affirmed her constitutional protections. In Digashu v. Government, Namibia’s courts ordered recognition of same-sex marriages that had been legally concluded abroad — a ruling Human Rights Watch covered as a landmark at the time, forcing the state to treat foreign marriages as valid regardless of the couple’s gender composition. In 2023’s Seiler-Lilles v. Government, litigants successfully challenged the country’s colonial-era sodomy and “unnatural sexual offences” statutes, and by mid-2024 Namibia’s High Court had formally decriminalized consensual same-sex conduct outright — a ruling Amnesty International called a victory for human rights on the continent. A 2024 case, Dausab v. Minister of Justice, added further constitutional challenges to discriminatory statutes still on the books.

Four major rulings in roughly three years, each expanding constitutional protection for LGBTQI+ Namibians, is not a pace many countries anywhere have matched.

The legislative response

Parliament’s answer to that run of rulings wasn’t silence — it was two new laws designed to route around them. The Marriage Act 14 of 2024 defines marriage exclusively as a union between people of the “biological sex assigned at birth,” a formulation that does double duty: it forecloses the same-sex marriage recognition the courts had just ordered, and it does so using language that erases transgender identity from the law’s vocabulary entirely, not just from marriage specifically. The Civil Registration and Identification Act 13 of 2024 reinforces the same exclusionary framing in how the state registers and identifies its citizens.

The timing isn’t coincidental. Namibia’s government appealed the decriminalization ruling within weeks of it being handed down, and the two 2024 laws followed the same broad window — a legislature moving quickly to write into statute the exclusions its own courts had just ruled unconstitutional in narrower contexts. It’s the pattern Solomons’s title is naming: every judicial opening met with a legislative attempt to close it back down.

What the report says needs to happen

Solomons situates the current fight in Namibia’s colonial legal inheritance — the sodomy laws only struck down in 2024 were relics of that era, not homegrown 21st-century policy — and argues that legal tolerance without legal protection isn’t a stable middle ground, just a slower-moving version of the same fight. The report’s recommendations push toward comprehensive statutory reform rather than case-by-case litigation: explicit non-discrimination protections, a legal gender recognition process that doesn’t depend on winning individual court cases, and marriage and family law that doesn’t have to be re-litigated every time Parliament passes a new act.

Namibia’s civil society groups aren’t waiting quietly for that to happen. The government’s appeal of the decriminalization ruling is still working through the courts, and Namibian activists have been publicly defiant about the outcome regardless of the legislative pushback — a sentiment perhaps best summarized by campaigners who’ve told international outlets, in effect, that the bigots won’t stop them. Whether the next round of rulings holds up against a Parliament that has shown it’s willing to legislate its way around judicial losses is the question Namibia’s LGBTQI+ community will be answering in real time over the next several years.

Sources: The Namibian; Human Rights Watch on decriminalization; Amnesty International.