71 Men Arrested as Senegal’s Anti-LGBTQ+ Crackdown Escalates
A harsher law threatens up to 10 years in prison and widens criminal exposure around trans life, advocacy, and financial support.
Senegalese authorities have arrested and charged 71 men with what prosecutors call “unnatural acts” as the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown intensifies. The public prosecutor’s office announced the cases on August 7 and said the men had been brought before a court, while charges against another 28 defendants were dropped. The announcement places 71 defendants within an enforcement campaign in which arrests, prosecution, imprisonment, and fear surrounding healthcare have become consequences of a state system deliberately made more punitive this year.
The crackdown was already underway before Senegal enacted harsher penalties in March. Reuters reported that 27 men were arrested between February 9 and 24, and by late April local human-rights activists and media had counted 86 arrests. Enforcement extended beyond Dakar, including a raid in Linguère in which 18 people were detained. The August cases therefore sit within a longer escalation rather than marking the beginning of the state’s campaign against LGBTQ+ people.
Senegal already criminalized consensual same-sex conduct under Article 319 of its penal code. In 2026, lawmakers dramatically increased the punishment available under that system. Parliament voted 135–0, with three abstentions, to increase prison sentences from one to five years to five to ten years and raise possible fines to as much as 10 million CFA francs. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye signed the measure into law by the end of March, turning an already punitive legal structure into one capable of taking a decade of a person’s life.
The law also reaches beyond private sexual conduct. It criminalizes what the government calls the “promotion” or “financing” of homosexuality, expanding criminal exposure around advocacy, financial assistance, and support networks serving LGBTQ+ people. Its language explicitly includes homosexuality, bisexuality, and what the statute calls “transsexuality,” placing trans people directly within the scope of the crackdown. For trans and LGBTQ+ people, that expansion means the danger is tied not only to intimate life but also to visibility, advocacy, financial assistance, and the networks people depend on for care and survival.
Human Rights Watch documented those pressures even before the harsher law took effect. Community health workers reported fear that their contact information could expose them to legal consequences if authorities found it on the phones of people they detained. That fear pushed the consequences of criminalization beyond police custody and courtrooms, threatening the relationships between patients, health workers, advocates, and community organizations that often provide essential support to people already facing stigma and state scrutiny.
The prison consequences followed quickly. On April 10, a court in Pikine-Guédiawaye sentenced a 24-year-old laborer to six years in prison and fined him 2 million CFA francs after convicting him of “acts against nature and public indecency.” It was the first reported conviction under the tougher law, and Reuters reported by late April that two convictions had already been recorded. The harsher penalties had moved from legislation into people’s lives, with years of imprisonment becoming an immediate consequence of the state’s expanded criminalization.
The same crackdown has disrupted access to healthcare. Government data reviewed by Reuters showed fewer patients visiting some HIV treatment centers as arrests intensified. The Senegalese National Council for the Fight Against AIDS found evidence that patients were forgoing antiretroviral medication because they feared arrest or abuse, while a queer Senegalese community health worker who had distributed HIV tests and prevention supplies told Reuters they had become afraid to leave home. Criminalization was no longer confined to the people taken into custody; it was shaping whether others felt safe enough to seek treatment at all.
Those healthcare consequences carry their own danger. Antiretroviral treatment suppresses HIV and protects health, but treatment cannot protect people who are too frightened to obtain it. When arrests make patients fear clinics, when community workers worry that a phone number could expose them to enforcement, and when the law creates criminal exposure around what it defines as the “promotion” or “financing” of homosexuality, the state’s actions place additional pressure on the systems LGBTQ+ and trans people rely on to stay alive and connected.
Responsibility for that escalation is not abstract. Senegalese lawmakers approved the harsher penalties. Faye signed them into law. Police carried out arrests. Prosecutors brought cases. Courts imposed prison sentences. During the parliamentary process, government ministers argued that the country’s previous law was too lenient. The consequences of that political decision are now visible in people arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, frightened away from treatment, and forced to calculate whether seeking help or remaining visible could put them in greater danger.
Human-rights organizations warned that expanding criminalization would deepen that harm. Human Rights Watch documented fear among LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV, including concerns about forced testing, exposure of HIV status, and the use of healthcare information in enforcement. FIDH warned that the expanded law would further expose LGBTQ+ people and those perceived to be LGBTQ+ to stigma, violence, and arbitrary arrest. Those warnings now stand alongside a growing record of arrests, convictions, prison sentences, and disrupted care.
The August cases now stand within that expanding enforcement record. They come after months of escalating enforcement and after lawmakers increased the prison terms available to courts while broadening criminal exposure around advocacy and financial support. For trans and LGBTQ+ people living beneath that system, the threat extends beyond the possibility of a courtroom sentence. It reaches decisions about leaving home, seeking medical treatment, contacting a community worker, providing assistance, organizing publicly, or allowing another person to know who they are.
Senegal’s public record now contains the law, the arrests, the prosecutions, the prison sentences, and documented disruption of healthcare. Behind each part of that record are people forced to carry the consequences of a state campaign that has made criminal punishment harsher and the boundaries of state targeting wider. Their safety, freedom, healthcare, and survival belong at the center of this story, while the lawmakers, executive officials, police, prosecutors, and courts responsible for enforcing that system remain plainly named.
Criminalization does not stop at the courtroom door. It reaches into healthcare, safety, community support, and the daily survival of trans and LGBTQ+ people forced to live under it.
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