Uganda Drops Charges Against Two Women Arrested for Kissing in Public
Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise faced up to life in prison under Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act after their February arrest. Prosecutors have now permanently dropped the case.
Two women arrested in northwestern Uganda for allegedly kissing in public are free of the criminal case that had hung over them for five months, after the country’s Director of Public Prosecutions permanently discontinued the prosecution on July 15.
Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise were arrested on February 18 in Arua City and charged under Section 2(1)(2) of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, the sweeping 2023 law that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality” and criminalizes same-sex intimacy more broadly. The announcement that charges were dropped came on a scheduled court appearance date, ending the case without a trial.
Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) and one of the country’s most prominent LGBTQ+ rights advocates, celebrated the outcome directly: “Finally, Wendy and Diana are free. Thank you to everyone who stood with them.” SMUG’s own statement echoed the relief: “Today, we celebrate an important victory: Wendy and Diana are finally free.”
A rare good outcome, with real limits
Cases brought under the Anti-Homosexuality Act rarely end this cleanly. The law, signed by President Yoweri Museveni in 2023, drew international condemnation and prompted the World Bank to pause new lending to Uganda, yet it has remained in force after Uganda’s Constitutional Court upheld most of its provisions in 2024. Arrests and prosecutions under the act and related public-order and morality statutes have continued since, and rights groups have documented a broader pattern of harassment, evictions, and violence against LGBTQ+ Ugandans that doesn’t depend on a conviction to do damage.
That’s the caveat activists are attaching to this outcome. Lesbophobia Archive, which tracks anti-LGBTQ+ persecution across the region, warned that “this win will anger conservative Ugandans and may incite death threats or mob violence,” and noted that Faith and Denise still lack sufficient resources to relocate somewhere safer. The concern isn’t hypothetical: a local politician, Richard Job Matua, responded to news of the dropped charges by warning, “I warn you that we are watching everything and will NOT hesitate to arrest those girls” — a reminder that being cleared by prosecutors doesn’t mean being safe from local officials or neighbors who supported the original arrest.
That tension is familiar to anyone who has followed Uganda’s LGBTQ+ rights landscape over the past several years: legal wins, when they come, are frequently narrow and case-specific, while the underlying climate of criminalization and stigma persists regardless of any single outcome. Public allegations of homosexuality in Uganda can trigger job loss, eviction, and violence long before — or even without — any court appearance.
The bigger picture
Uganda is not unique in the region. Similar anti-LGBTQ+ penal code provisions have advanced or passed in recent years in Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Senegal, and Niger, part of a wider pattern of governments across the continent using “African values” and sovereignty framing to justify criminalization, according to political scientists who study the trend. The Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to withdraw US support for LGBTQ+ human rights programming in Africa has removed one source of diplomatic and financial pressure that previously pushed back against these laws, leaving local and regional advocacy groups like SMUG carrying more of that weight themselves.
For now, though, advocates are taking the win. Two women who faced the possibility of life in prison for a kiss are no longer facing prosecution — a small, hard-fought data point in a legal environment that offers very few of them.
Sources: PinkNews, 76crimes, MambaOnline, Metro Weekly.
