According to the UK government, more gay people who have historical criminal convictions relating to now non-existent laws surrounding homosexuality will be eligible for a pardon. While schemes to pardon those convicted of buggery and gross indecency already exist, campaigners argue that that the schemes are too narrow.
With a broader scheme that encompasses the full breadth of homosexuality’s criminalization in recent history, “[more] convictions would be wiped from record and an automatic pardon given,” according to the BBC.
“Since 2012, people in England and Wales have been able to apply to have historical same-sex sexual cautions and convictions disregarded,” but the new promise from the government includes more opportunity to be pardoned.
There have been campaigns to pardon the dead for their so-called “crimes,” out of respect, too. In 2017, “Turing’s Law,” was passed in the UK. Named after the “wartime codebreaker” Alan Turing, who was convicted of “gross indecency for homosexual acts,” the law grants posthumous pardons to those who were convicted of homosexual acts now lawfully accepted.
Campaigners argue that the existing schemes appear to include the full extent of criminalized, consensual homosexual behaviour, but they don’t. Campaigner Lord Cashman said solicitation, which is not covered under the scheme, “was used to entrap gay and bisexual men, sometimes for doing nothing more than chatting up another adult man.”
The existing schemes are said to lack the compassionate reflection needed in order to understand how a myriad of laws were used to disempower homosexuals, not just laws that directly referenced homosexuality. Cashman’s peer, Lord Lexden, said the schemes’ limited consideration is “an affront to gay people.”
After such criticisms, the government announced the intention to “use an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill to broaden eligibility for a pardon.” The proposed amendments “will encompass any repealed or abolished civilian or military offence which was imposed on someone purely for, or due to, consensual same-sex sexual activity.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “It is only right that where offences have been abolished, convictions for consensual activity between same-sex partners should be disregarded too.
“I hope that expanding the pardons and disregards scheme will go some way to righting the wrongs of the past and to reassuring members of the LGBT community that Britain is one of the safest places in the world to call home.”
Lord Cashman, Lord Lexden and Prof Paul Johnson, another campaigner, released a joint statement, welcoming the news: “Parliament has a duty to wipe away the terrible stains which they placed, quite wrongly, on the reputations of countless gay people over centuries.”
