NAIROBI — Forcing men to undergo anal examinations just because they are suspected of being gay has been ruled illegal by a court in Kenya.



The decision has been celebrated by activists and human rights organizations, and could influence an upcoming ruling in a separate landmark case about LGBT rights in Kenya.

Forced anal exams as a means of determining a man’s sexuality are common practice in at least nine countries — seven of which are in Africa — despite being considered a degrading form of torture in international law and being found to have no medical merits by physicians. And while some have vowed to ban the exams, Kenya is the first country to have a documented case where judges have ruled against them.

Njeri Gateru, the head of legal affairs for Kenya’s National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News that the advocacy group is “thankful that the Appeal Court has put Kenyan citizens’ rights first. With this ruling, the judges are saying that we all deserve to be treated with dignity and afforded our basic rights, as enshrined in the Kenyan Constitution.”

Gateru added that the “humiliation and pain caused by these useless anal examinations will follow our clients for the rest of their lives. However, we are emboldened to see our constitution at work, ensuring that all Kenyans have the right to dignity.”

The decision was a reversal of an earlier ruling from 2016 on the legality of such exams, and whether or not they violated a person’s privacy. The case involved two young men identified by their initials in the petition as COL and GMN, who were arrested by police near a bar in Mombasa — on the coast of Kenya near the Indian Ocean — in February 2015 because they were thought to be gay.

While they were in custody, police searched their homes. They found a video of the TV show Queer as Folk, which a local judiciary considered sufficient evidence to suggest that the two were having sex with other men. The official then authorized a doctor to conduct the exams, and HIV and Hepatitis B tests. The men consented to the exams, but later argued in court that they had been coerced. They were ultimately charged with engaging in unnatural offenses, a reference to one of Kenya’s penal codes that prohibits “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature.”

Human Rights Watch senior researcher Neela Ghoshal, who has interviewed both the men and the doctor who carried out their exams, told BuzzFeed News that the arrests were the result of an online pornography scandal that increased criminal profiling of LGBT people. Many people suspected that some of the men in the videos were from the area.