In 2017, the Constitutional Court of Lesotho, issued a landmark ruling on the rights of persons with disabilities in Lesotho in the case of Koali v. Director of Public Prosecutions. The applicant alleged he was sexually assaulted by a woman. The prosecuting authority declined to prosecute on the sole basis that he was deemed incompetent to testify because of his disability, which is not specified in the judgment. The applicant raised a constitutional challenge to section 219 of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act of 1981, which deemed individuals with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities, variously referred to as “idiots”, “lunatics”, “imbeciles” or “afflicted” as unfit to testify in criminal proceedings. The Court found that these provisions of the Act violated the constitutional rights to equality before the law and protection from discrimination of persons with disabilities and condemned also the “disrespectful” language used by the laws in reference to such persons describing the provision as “totally inconsistent with the rationale of the Constitution” . The Court therefore declared the provision unconstitutional.”
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The full judgement can be downloaded here.