German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Friday that he will seek to ban so-called conversion therapies that claim to change a person's sexual orientation.

"Homosexuality is not an illness and therefore does not need therapy," Spahn told the Berlin daily die tageszeitung. Spahn said he hoped a German law banning the practices could be passed by the middle of 2019.

"I do not believe in these therapies, mainly owing to my own homosexuality," said Spahn, who represents the right-wing of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union party (CDU). Spahn said that "from a legal point of view, these services today can be a form of assault, and not only against minors."

The practices collectively referred to as "conversion therapy" use a range of techniques that claim to change a person's sexual orientation. Some methods involve injections of large doses of testosterone, while others apply electric shocks to people as they view images of homosexual acts.

Spahn told the paper the Health Ministry wanted to commission a study on the legal processes needed to achieve the ban, based on examples from Malta, New York and Australia. "Based on the findings, we will then decide what we can implement in Germany," Spahn said. "But we also still have to convince colleagues from other ministries." Read more via DW