Peru: Police cadets fight dismissal due to gay rumors

I've certainly been burning that 'annotations' function over at YouTube as of late and here's another video which I've used the function to translate what's being said on-screen to English.

In this case, the news report is about a couple of police academy cadets who were dismissed from school in 2003 based on rumors that they were gay. As Diario de Lima reports, Peru's constitution bans discrimination based on sexual orientation, but what if they neither man identifies themselves as gay?

Well, one of the dismissed cadets brought his case before Peru's Constitutional Court and argued that it had been unconstitutional to have been dismissed based on the perception that he might be gay - and he won. He was recently reinstated as a police officer.

Based on the verdict, the second man says - in the video - that he is also considering going to court and one of the Constitutional Court judges has said that the court should also vote in his favor. Judge Carlos Mesia says that the country's military regulations still ban homosexual conduct among police officers and soldiers but that they precede changes to the Peruvian constitution which now make the ban unconstitutional.

Updates:

• Interior Minister bans gays from police service possibly setting up constitutional clash (May 14, 2009)
• A call for an "immediate repeal" of homophobic police regulation (May 23, 2009)