meaningless. One might as well have a clause which states merely “all people are equal in dignity and rights”. The drafters of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, felt that specific recognition of some categories was required. This is partly due to the fact that the genesis and motivation for the Declaration was the Second World War. The horror of the Holocaust had degraded humanity as a whole. The opening statement of the United Nations Charter thus expressed the determination to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person” which had been adulterated by the supremacist ideology of the Nazi regime. The experience of the Holocaust thus made it fitting that specific mention was made of discrimination on the basis of race. In this way, expression was given to the determination of the Charter, that there should never again be another Holocaust. Other failures of human rights in the area of equality has led to the expansion of categories receiving special mention, there now being some 23 categories26 mentioned in various human instruments. This then begs a further question, that is, when does a group become a category for the purposes of human rights jurisprudence? Why, for example, should human rights jurisprudence focus upon the category of sexual orientation and not, for example, height? Sexual Orientation as a Distinct Category Once again, it is to the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court to which we may turn to determine when a group might be regarded as a distinct classification which will attract “heightened scrutiny” and to determine whether the law in question violates the provision of equal protection of the law. The first criterion is that the group in question must have suffered “a history of purposeful discrimination”. The second is that the discrimination embodies “a gross unfairness that is sufficiently inconsistent with the ideals of equal protection to term it invidious”. The third that the class is, by its numbers or its history, politically powerless. Systematic Discrimination The first requirement is less restrictively phrased in international law than in American jurisprudence. International law does not require a history of discrimination but rather “systematic” discrimination27. There can be little doubt that gays and lesbians meet this requirement. Gays and lesbians have “historically been the object of pernicious and sustained hostility” 28. The most obvious area of discrimination against gay men in Zimbabwe is in criminal law. Roman-Dutch common law, from which Zimbabwean law is derived, has never treated perceived sexual deviance lightly. Initially, a sexual act was regarded as deviant if it were not directed solely at procreation. Any such act was regarded as sodomy. The law then evolved so that sodomy came to mean sex per anum between two males29. The Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act has now returned the law to a position which more closely resembles the original Roman Dutch law in its definition of sodomy. In earlier versions of the common law, a confluence of racial and sexual intolerance forbade sex between Jew and Christian regardless of the gender of the 26 Heinze op. cit. p. 221 27 Heinze op. cit. p. 227 28 Watkins v U.S. Army 847 F.2d 1329. It is worth remembering that it is not only Jews, Blacks and Gypsies who were exterminated by the Nazia, but also homosexuals. 29 see Propotkin Getting to the Bottom of Sodomy in Zimbabwe Unpublished paper University of Zimbabwe, Faculty of Law