When the Law Becomes a Weapon: Why We Must Stand With Those Who Refuse to Be Erased.

Feature Article When the Law Becomes a Weapon: Why We Must Stand With Those Who Refuse to Be Erased.

SUN, 01 NOV 2026

Imagine a law that decides who you are allowed to love, and then decides that even speaking up about it is a crime.

That is no longer imagination in West Africa. It is the legal reality in Burkina Faso, and it is knocking on the door of Ghana.

Some of you will stop reading here. I ask you to stay for a few minutes. I am not asking you to agree with me on every question. I am asking you to look at the facts and then answer one question honestly: Can a government take away someone's right to exist, to gather, and to speak, and call that justice?

What Happened in Burkina Faso

Let me be precise, because in human rights work precision is our armour.

The law was adopted by Burkina Faso's unelected transitional parliament on 1 September 2025 and signed by Captain Ibrahim Traoré on 25 September. It criminalises "homosexual acts or similar practices" and also "behaviour likely to promote" them, with two to five years in prison and fines of up to 10 million CFA francs. Burkina Faso, as a former French colony, never inherited anti-gay laws at independence, so this is a sharp break from its own legal past. In late December 2025, a foreign national became the first person known to be convicted under the new provision.

Notice the second clause, the one about "behaviour likely to promote." That clause is not about private life. It is about voice, organising, and gathering. It can be stretched to cover a meeting, a poster, a hashtag, or a peaceful march. This is how a criminal law turns into a ban on assembly, even where no Pride march has ever been held.

The space around that law is also shrinking. Frontline Defenders reported in May 2026 that 118 civil society organisations in Burkina Faso had been dissolved, which raises the risks for human rights defenders.

The reaction from rights bodies was immediate. Amnesty International pointed out that Burkina Faso has ratified both the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and that the new law sits at odds with both. Human Rights Watch warned that such laws foster violence and abuse against LGBT people.

Burkina Faso is not alone. According to the Human Dignity Trust, 65 countries now criminalise consensual same-sex intimacy. Uganda has gone as far as making "aggravated homosexuality" a capital offence.

The Proof That Peaceful Resistance Works

When I feel the weight of these facts, I look to Hungary.

In March 2025, Hungary's government passed a law that used child-protection language to ban the Budapest Pride march, with fines and facial recognition to identify participants. The organisers did not cancel. More than 100,000 people defied the ban and marched in 2025, and it became one of the largest protests against the government of the time.

What followed matters. After a change of government, Hungarian police approved the 2026 Pride march on 29 May. In October 2026, the National Assembly repealed the anti-LGBTQ+ media and advertising provisions that the EU's top court had found to breach European law.

I do not tell this story to say that everything is solved. Rights groups note that the surveillance tools behind the earlier ban remain embedded in Hungarian law. I tell it because it shows something every activist must remember: unjust bans do not collapse because they are polite. They collapse because enough people, peacefully and persistently, refuse to accept them.

Why This Is Ghana's Story Too

I write from Accra, so let me bring this home.

Ghana's Parliament passed the amended Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill on 29 May 2026, and the decision now rests with the President and any legal or constitutional challenges. President John Dramani Mahama has said publicly that he would sign it if Parliament passed it. The picture is now more complicated. The Speaker of Parliament has since acknowledged that the bill was rushed and contains errors, and the process is stuck in procedural limbo. Ghana's Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice told Parliament that the bill would encroach on the fundamental right of association.

Our own Constitution is clear about assembly. Article 21(1)(d) guarantees freedom of assembly, including the freedom to take part in processions and demonstrations. Articles 15 and 17 protect dignity and equality before the law. These words were not written for the popular. They were written for everyone, and most of all for the unpopular, because the popular have never needed constitutional protection.

The Argument I Owe an Honest Answer

Let me state the other side in its strongest form, because I respect my readers.

Supporters of these laws say Ghanaian and African societies are deeply religious and family-centred, and that lawmakers are reflecting the will of their people. They argue that nations have the sovereign right to protect their culture from outside pressure. Some say they want to protect children. Those are sincere positions held by sincere people, and many of the bill's backers include respected religious bodies.

Here is my answer.
First, fundamental rights are not decided by majority vote. If they were, no minority would ever be safe, on any issue, in any era.

Second, criminalisation does not remove people; it removes their safety. It pushes them away from clinics, courts, and police stations, exactly where they need to go when they are attacked.

Third, child protection is not served by this approach. We already have laws against abuse, and they should be enforced strongly against every offender.

Fourth, sovereignty cuts both ways. Burkina Faso and Ghana freely ratified the African Charter and other human rights treaties. Honouring promises we made ourselves is not a foreign imposition.

And fifth, in Burkina Faso's case, the law was passed by a body no citizen elected. Calling that "the will of the people" is a stretch.

You can hold deep religious convictions, and I have mine, and still believe that no one should be jailed, beaten, or silenced for who they are. Faith teaches us to protect the vulnerable. It has never taught us to hunt them.

What Solidarity Must Look Like

Solidarity is not a hashtag. It is not shouting from a safe distance and disappearing when the news cycle moves.

Between now and 10 December, Human Rights Day, here is what I am calling on all of us to do:

1. Listen first.
Those most affected know their own risks. Follow the lead of grassroots LGBTQI+ organisations and do not speak over them or drag them into danger for the sake of a photograph.

2. Defend the right to assemble, peacefully and lawfully.

Challenge unlawful bans through courts, public statements, notified gatherings, vigils, and solidarity events in places where it is safe to hold them. Nonviolence is not weakness. It is the method that Mandela, Gandhi, and King made undeniable.

3. Protect, don't expose.
Where gathering carries real danger, support from outside the zone of risk: share verified information, fund legal aid, and amplify voices that choose to be heard. Never post identifiable images of participants.

4. Back the legal fight.
Support legal aid funds, strategic litigation, and human rights lawyers. Constitutional challenges are slow, but they are where bad laws are broken.

5. Write to power.
Contact your MP, your regional bodies, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. Ask them to uphold Article 11 of the African Charter on assembly and Article 2 on non-discrimination.

6. Protect the defenders.
Support organisations that give emergency help to defenders under threat, and share their safe contact routes.

7. Change the conversation at home.
Speak in your church, mosque, family, and friend groups. Replace slurs and jokes with facts. Most hatred survives on silence.

A Word From Me

I am twenty-one years old. I am a student, a writer, and a human rights volunteer, and I believe my generation will be judged by one question: What did you do when a law turned into a weapon?

I think of Malala, who was shot at fifteen and kept speaking. I think of Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in prison and walked out refusing bitterness. Neither of them waited for permission or for a comfortable moment. They simply decided that someone's dignity mattered more than their own safety, and that is what real power looks like.

I do not need you to agree with everything I believe. I need you to agree that no human being should be criminalised for existing, and no peaceful gathering should be banned for what it stands for.

On 10 December, Human Rights Day, let us stand together.

Dignity is not a favour. It is a right.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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