Uganda's President Pardons the Politician Who Championed Its Anti-Gay Law

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has pardoned Anita Among, the country’s former Speaker of Parliament, dropping corruption, money laundering, and illicit enrichment charges that had kept her under house arrest for 100 days. Museveni ordered all criminal proceedings against her ended and her assets, frozen during the investigation, released.

The pardon itself is a domestic Ugandan political story — Among was detained in May amid high-profile corruption raids, and outlets like The Observer and Pulse Uganda have covered the decision largely through that lens, with some Ugandan commentators framing it as Museveni prioritizing political stability over prosecuting an ally. But for Uganda’s LGBTQ+ community, Among’s name carries a second, harder meaning: as Speaker, she was one of the most visible champions of the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ laws in the world, which imposes life imprisonment for consensual same-sex relations and the death penalty for a broadly defined category of “aggravated homosexuality."

"Time to apologize”

Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), responded to the pardon by calling on Among to address the harm caused by the law she helped push through. “Time to apologize to the Ugandan LGBTQ+ community as well, the community you have hurt so deeply,” Mugisha said. “Homophobia is inhuman.”

Among has not done so. Instead, she posted a message on X thanking Museveni for what she called his “unmatched parental grace” in granting her mercy — gratitude aimed entirely at the president, with no acknowledgment of Mugisha’s request or of the law’s human cost.

That cost has been well documented since the Anti-Homosexuality Act passed. Human rights groups have recorded a sharp rise in mob violence, evictions, blackmail, and arbitrary arrests of LGBTQ+ Ugandans in the law’s aftermath, alongside a chilling effect on HIV services after clinics and outreach workers became targets of suspicion. The law also triggered international consequences for Uganda itself, including World Bank lending restrictions and sanctions or aid reviews from several Western governments — costs the Ugandan government has largely characterized as foreign interference in a matter of national sovereignty and values.

A pardon that raises a separate question

Uganda’s own commentators have noted the awkward optics of a swift, unconditional pardon for a well-connected former Speaker, delivered by presidential order rather than through the courts, in a country where ordinary corruption defendants rarely get the same treatment. The Observer, a Ugandan outlet, published a piece bluntly titled “Selective Mercy,” questioning what equal justice means when it can be waived by decree for the politically connected.

For TrueQueer’s purposes, the more relevant point is what the episode reveals about accountability, or its absence, for the architects of anti-LGBTQ policy once the political winds shift. Among faced consequences for alleged corruption, not for her role in a law that human rights organizations, UN officials, and foreign governments have all criticized as a severe rights violation — and even those corruption consequences were undone within months by a single presidential signature. The law she helped pass, meanwhile, remains fully in force.

The bigger picture

Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act has also drawn a constitutional challenge that remains before the country’s courts, with LGBTQ+ rights groups continuing to argue the law violates protections in Uganda’s own constitution. Museveni, who signed the act into law in 2023 over significant international pressure, has shown no indication he intends to revisit it, pardon or no pardon.

What Among’s episode leaves behind, then, is less a resolution than a reminder: in Uganda, as in a number of the world’s harshest environments for LGBTQ+ people, the officials who write and defend criminalization laws rarely face any reckoning tied to that specific harm. Among’s brush with consequences came from an unrelated corruption case — and even that one has now been quietly closed.

Sources: 76 Crimes, “Uganda’s president pardons homophobic politician”; The Observer Uganda, “Selective Mercy: Anita Among walks free”; Pulse Uganda.