Men convicted of same-sex sexual activity on the basis of outdated and homophobic laws will receive a full pardon, the Scottish government announces.
Holyrood's justice secretary, Michael Matheson, told the chamber on Tuesday afternoon that the parliament would bring forward a Scottish "Turing law" to automatically pardon gay and bisexual men convicted of sexual offences that are no longer criminal.
He added that his officials had also been in discussion with Police Scotland to identify the most effective way of ensuring that past convictions for consensual sex between men no longer appeared on a person's criminal record.
A similar law intended to apply to England and Wales was scuppered by the Conservative justice minister, Sam Gyimah, on Friday after he spoke so long that it ran out of time.
Gyimah's behaviour attracted cross-party condemnation after the private member's bill, put forward by John Nicolson of the SNP, failed to pass to its next stage in the Commons.
Nicolson's bill would have gone further than an amendment to the policing and crime bill proposed by the government, which only pardons the thousands of men who are already dead, while the living will have to apply to the Home Office to get their convictions overturned.
The law is named after Alan Turing, whose work during the second world war helped break the German Enigma code, who was pardoned posthumously in 2013. Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 and chemically castrated. He died two years later and an inquest found he had killed himself.
Private homosexual acts between men aged over 21 were decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967, but the law in Scotland was not changed until 1980.
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