Thursday, May 14, 2009

Peru: Interior Minister bans gays from police service possibly setting up constitutional clash

BBC News is reporting that Peruvian Interior Minister Mercedes Cabanillas has introduced a series of regulations that ban gays and 'adulterers' from police service ("Peru 'bar gay people from police'").

Cabanillas, who is nicknamed "Thatcher" for her strong-armed tactics, has said that these and other measures are meant to combat police corruption.

Europa Press reports that those who break the norms will be suspended indefinitely ("Peruvian government prohibits presence of homosexuals and adulterers in the National Police").

Cabanillas said that these regulations were mean to "take one more step towards morality" in the police and also stated that it was "a starting point to improve the image of the police".

The new regulations seem to stand in contrast to a recent decision by the nation's Constitutional Court, which ruled that the rights of a police cadet were violated when he was dismissed due to rumors that he was gay ("Police cadets fight dismissals due to gay rumors"). The Court said that the Peruvian constitution banned discrimination based on sexual orientation despite regulations calling for dismissal of gays from the police that were still written in the military code books.

In a television report that ran on Peruvian television back in April, Constitutional Court Justice Carlos Mesia, read an excerpt from the standing military code at the time which read "punishment will be given to a military officer who practices dishonest or anti-natural acts with persons of the same gender inside or outside the military institute".

In the news report, he argued that discriminatory protections in the Peruvian constitution made those regulations invalid. Those comments seem to indicate that the new regulations passed by the Ministry of Interior might also fit the description.

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1 comment:

libhom said...

The South American right is at least as nutty as the US right. It's no wonder most countries in that continent have rejected them.