abstract
| - Male homosexual conduct only (not lesbianism) has been a crime since 1889 when Cyprus was a British colony, and thus like the British law against buggery it was technically silent about female homosexuality or lesbianism. In 1960 Cyprus became a fully independent nation from Britain and still "maintained" the old buggery laws. Then in 1993, a Cypriot man named Alecos Modinos, President of the Cypriot Gay Liberation Movement won his court case under the European Convention on Human Rights that ruled that Cyprus laws prohibited homosexuality violated his right to have a private life. However, Cyprus legislators refused to liberalize their own law, and it was not until Cyprus stood to lose its prospective membership to the European Union that in 1998 Cyprus lawmakers decriminalized homosexual relations between consenting adults in private, but set the age of consent for homosexual conduct at eighteen, while the age of consent for heterosexual conduct was at sixteen. Aside from the unequal age of consent, the new criminal amendments also included discrimination against homosexuals in terms of freedom of speech, expression, assembly and the press. The law also addressed both male and female homosexuality for the first time. In 2000 these provisions were liberalized, but the unequal age of consent remained until 2002 when a new universal age of consent was established at seventeen. Sexual conduct that occurs in public or with a minor is subject to a prison term of five years and in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus male homosexual conduct only (not lesbianism) is still illegal and yet to have the law repealed by a new Criminal Code from 1 January 2009 [1]. On the other hand, the Cyprus military still bars homosexuals from serving under the grounds that homosexuality is a mental illness, and gay sexual conduct can be a crime under military law and the term is 6 months in a military jail although this is rarely if ever enforced. .
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