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The "Alan Turing law" is an informal term for the law in the United Kingdom, contained in the Policing and Crime Act 2017, [1] which serves as an amnesty law to pardon men who were cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. [2] The provision is named after Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker and computing pioneer, who was convicted of gross indecency in 1952. Turing received a royal pardon posthumously in 2013. The law applies in England and Wales. [2]
Several proposals had been put forward for an Alan Turing law, [3] [4] [5] and introducing such a law has been government policy since 2015. [6] To implement the pardon, the British Government announced on 20 October 2016 that it would support an amendment to the Policing and Crime Act that would provide a posthumous pardon, also providing an automatic formal pardon for living people who had had such offences removed from their record. [7] [8] A rival bill to implement the Alan Turing law, in second reading at the time of the government announcement, was filibustered. [9] The bill received royal assent on 31 January 2017, and the pardon was implemented that same day. [10] The law provides pardons only for men convicted of acts that are no longer offences; those convicted under the same laws of offences that were still crimes on the date the law went into effect, such as cottaging, underage sex, or rape, were not pardoned. [11]
Manchester Withington MP John Leech, often described as 'the architect' of the Alan Turing Law, led a high-profile campaign to pardon Turing and submitted several bills to parliament, leading to the eventual posthumous pardon. [12]
All homosexual acts between men were illegal until the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 in England and Wales, the Criminal Justice Act 1980 in Scotland, and the Homosexual Offences Order 1982 in Northern Ireland. As the three regions are separate jurisdictions, and many elements of criminal law are devolved matters in the United Kingdom, the British Government by convention, only legislated a pardon for England and Wales. [11]
Alan Turing, after whom the proposed law has been informally named, was a mathematician, codebreaker and founding father of computer science who died in 1954 in suspicious circumstances, following his conviction for gross indecency in 1952. A campaign to pardon Turing was led by former Manchester Withington MP John Leech, [13] who called it 'utterly disgusting and ultimately just embarrassing' [14] that the conviction was upheld as long as it was. Turing himself was pardoned posthumously through the royal prerogative of mercy under David Cameron in 2013, [15] [16] but contrary to the requests of some campaigners including Leech, the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and the activist and journalist Peter Tatchell, his pardon was not immediately followed by pardons for anyone else convicted. [17] [18] Leech submitted several motions and campaigned for half a decade as an MP for a more general pardon and continued to do so after losing his seat in the 2015 general election. [19]
The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 proposed by David Cameron introduced the disregard procedure, under which men with an offence of "gross indecency between men" on their criminal record could petition to have these offences disregarded during criminal record checks by courts and employers, but fell short of an actual pardon. [6]
While in opposition, the Labour Party under Ed Miliband announced that it would introduce an Alan Turing law if elected at the 2015 general election. [20] The Conservative Party under Cameron subsequently announced the same policy. [6] When Theresa May became Prime Minister following the resignation of David Cameron, she also announced that her government would support the Alan Turing law. [21] [22]
In June 2016, John Nicolson MP introduced a Private Member's Bill, the Sexual Offences (Pardons Etc.) Bill 2016–17, intended to implement the proposal. [23] In October 2016, the Conservative government announced that, instead of supporting the Private Member's Bill's original proposal for a blanket pardon for all, it would enact the proposed changes through an amendment to the forthcoming Policing and Crime Bill 2016. This amendment would provide a posthumous pardon for the dead, make it easier for living individuals to clear their names, and also provide an automatic formal pardon for living people who had had such offences removed from their record through the disregard process. [7] [8] [24] When Nicolson's bill was debated in Parliament on 21 October 2016, it was successfully filibustered by Conservative MP Sam Gyimah and failed to proceed. [25] The Policing and Crime Bill amendment passed, and received royal assent on 31 January 2017. [10]
The two differed in the process for dealing with cases where the conviction was for an act that would still be considered an offence under current law. Both attempted to exclude these, but Nicolson's bill provided an automatic pardon while the government bill required the petitioner to go through the "disregard process" first. This would mean that the Home Office will investigate each case involving living people to ensure that the act that the petitioner was convicted of is no longer considered a criminal act, to avoid pardoning men convicted of underage sex or rape. [11] More controversially, this means that it would also not pardon men who were arrested in public toilets, as they would today be guilty of the offence of "sexual activity in a public lavatory". [26] The government claimed that without this check, men who were convicted of such an offence would be able to claim that they had been pardoned. [9] Nicolson disagreed and, backed by the LGBT campaign group Stonewall, [26] said that the government was attempting to "hijack" the law by announcing the amendment just prior to the second reading of his Private Member's Bill, and said that his bill already excluded cases where the offence was still considered a crime. [27] The Nicholson bill would not have been able to clear criminal records of men who still carried convictions. This would still have to be done through the disregard process, leading to possible cases in which it would not be clear whether or not a pardon had been granted, described by James Chalmers, Regius Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow, as a "Schrödinger's pardon". [28]
The announcement was broadly welcomed, but some quarters said it did not go far enough. The campaigner George Montague said that he would refuse a pardon, as a pardon suggested that he was guilty of a crime, and instead asked for a government apology. [11]
Matt Houlbrook, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham, said that the announcement was of both "symbolic and practical importance" to gay men still living with the offences on their criminal record, but noted that using Alan Turing as a figurehead retroactively gave him an identity as a "gay martyr" that he never sought in life. [26] [29] James Chalmers, Regius Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow, noted that the disregard process had already provided an effective pardon, and neither implementation of the Alan Turing law would be able to pardon people who had committed acts that, although technically still criminal, are not usually prosecuted (such as sex between a 16-year-old and a 15-year-old or sex in certain public places). [28]
As the law and the disregard process applies only to England and Wales, groups in Northern Ireland and Scotland campaigned for equivalent laws in their jurisdictions. [30] [28] The Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) (Scotland) Act 2018 brought in a similar 'disregard' system in Scotland in 2019. [31]
As of January 2017 [update] , some 49,000 men had been posthumously pardoned under the terms of the Policing and Crime Act 2017. [32]
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Gross indecency is a crime in some parts of the English-speaking world, originally used to criminalize sexual activity between men that fell short of sodomy, which required penetration. The term was first used in British law in a statute of the British Parliament in 1885 and was carried forward in other statutes throughout the British Empire. The offense was never actually defined in any of the statutes which used it, which left the scope of the offence to be defined by court decisions.
John Sampson Macfarlane Leech is a British Liberal Democrat politician who was Member of Parliament for Manchester Withington from 2005 to 2015. Since 2016, he has represented Didsbury West on Manchester City Council.
The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, or "An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes," was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the latest in a 25-year series of legislation in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland beginning with the Offences against the Person Act 1861. It raised the age of consent from 13 years of age to 16 years of age and delineated the penalties for sexual offences against women and minors. It also strengthened existing legislation against prostitution and homosexuality. This act was also notable for the circumstances of its passage in Parliament.
The rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have varied over time.
The Bolton 7 were a group of gay and bisexual men who were convicted on 12 January 1998 in the United Kingdom before Judge Michael Lever at Bolton Crown Court of the offences of gross indecency under the Sexual Offences Act 1956 and of age of consent offences under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Although gay sex was partially decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act 1967, they were all convicted under section 13 of the 1956 Act because more than two men had sex together, which was still illegal. One of the participants was also six months under the statutory age of consent for gay sex which was 18 at the time.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Nigeria face legal and social challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents. LGBT rights are generally infringed upon and homosexuality is illegal in Nigeria and punishable by up to 14 years of prison in the conventional court system. There is no legal protection for LGBT rights in Nigeria—a largely conservative country of more than 225 million people, split between a mainly Muslim north and a largely Christian south. Very few LGBT persons are open about their sexual orientation, as violence against them is frequent. Many LGBTQ Nigerians are fleeing to countries with progressive law to seek protection.
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 is an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. It legalised homosexual acts in England and Wales, on the condition that they were consensual, in private and between two men who had attained the age of 21. The law was extended to Scotland by the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 and to Northern Ireland by the Homosexual Offences Order 1982.
Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, commonly known as the Labouchere Amendment, made "gross indecency" a crime in the United Kingdom. In practice, the law was used broadly to prosecute male homosexuals where actual sodomy could not be proven. The penalty of life imprisonment for sodomy was also so harsh that successful prosecutions were rare. The new law was much more enforceable. It was also meant to raise the age of consent for heterosexual intercourse. Section 11 was repealed and re-enacted by section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956, which in turn was repealed by the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially decriminalised male homosexual behaviour.
George Everett Klippert was the last person in Canada to be arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for gross indecency before the decriminalization of homosexual acts in 1969; the reform was a direct result of the Klippert case.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the British Crown dependency of the Isle of Man have evolved substantially since the early 2000s. Private and consensual acts of male homosexuality on the island were decriminalised in 1992. LGBT rights have been extended and recognised in law since then, such as an equal age of consent (2006), employment protection from discrimination (2006), gender identity recognition (2009), the right to enter into a civil partnership (2011), the right to adopt children (2011) and the right to enter into a civil marriage (2016).
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Tanzania face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Homosexuality in Tanzania is a socially taboo topic, and same-sex sexual acts are criminal offences, punishable with life imprisonment. The law also punishes heterosexuals who engage in oral sex and anal intercourse.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Dominica face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Sodomy, also known as "buggery", is illegal for both heterosexuals and homosexuals. Dominica provides no recognition to same-sex unions, whether in the form of marriage or civil unions, and no law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in Malawi face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents.
National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and Another v Minister of Justice and Others is a decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa which struck down the laws prohibiting consensual sexual activities between men. Basing its decision on the Bill of Rights in the Constitution – and in particular its explicit prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation – the court unanimously ruled that the crime of sodomy, as well as various other related provisions of the criminal law, were unconstitutional and therefore invalid.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) rights in Scotland are generally in line with the rest of the United Kingdom, which have evolved extensively over time and are now regarded as some of the most progressive in Europe. In both 2015 and 2016, Scotland was recognised as the "best country in Europe for LGBTI legal equality".
A sodomy law is a law that defines certain sexual acts as crimes. The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in the law, but are typically understood by courts to include any sexual act deemed to be "unnatural" or "immoral". Sodomy typically includes anal sex, oral sex, and bestiality. In practice, sodomy laws have rarely been enforced against heterosexual couples, and have mostly been used to target homosexual couples.
Samuel Phillip Gyimah is a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for East Surrey from 2010 to 2019. First elected as a Conservative, Gyimah rebelled against the government to block a no-deal Brexit and had the Conservative whip removed in September 2019. He subsequently joined the Liberal Democrats and stood unsuccessfully for them in Kensington at the 2019 general election. Gyimah now serves on the board of Goldman Sachs International. He also has a number of private equity and venture capital interests at the intersection of capital, business, and government, including; Renaissance Learning, a global education technology business backed by Blackstone, TPG and Francisco Partners.
The Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is one of the Ecclesiastical Courts Acts 1787 to 1860. The Act is sometimes known as the "ECJA."
In England and Wales, where homosexual acts between consenting adults was permitted after 1967, there is similar legislation - dubbed the "Turing law" after the World War Two code-breaker Alan Turing who was pardoned posthumously in 2013 for his conviction of gross indecency.