El tratamiento de la homosexualidad en la legislación penal españ

Abstract

This paper analyzes the historical treatment of homosexuality in Spanish criminal legislation and case law, and how it evolved from conceiving homosexuals as criminal perpetrators, to portraying them as victims. A criminal offence for almost ten centuries —rom the middle ages to the eighties of the last century— this moralist construction was grounded on a successive identification of homosexuality with sin, disease and crime. We study how in hardly ten years homosexuality was decriminalized and homosexuals were recognized as a collective protected by the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender included in the anti-discrimination provisions of the Penal Code of 1995, even if these provisions have been very rarely enforced. The explicit identification of homosexuals as potential victims of persecution is even clearer in the new Spanish asylum introduced by the Ley 12/2009, de 30 de octubre.