Petition to punish gay sex blocked
JAKARTA: Indonesia’s Constitutional Court yesterday rejected an effort to criminalise extramarital and gay sex after 18 months of debate, during which petitioners challenged the country’s 1963 Criminal Code and asked the court to amend it.
A nine-member judicial panel of the court ruled that, after hearing opinions from experts, it is not authorised to amend the relevant law and that the current law’s articles challenged by an activist group did not violate the country’s 1945 constitution.
“Therefore, the court rejected the petition in its entirety,” presiding judge Arief Hidayat told a hearing, adding that four of the panel’s nine judges, including himself, dissented.
The four judges agreed with the justification of criminalising extramarital and gay sex under the pretext of religious morality.
The ruling also reiterated the court’s authority as a negative legislator or the guardian of the law, and not a positive legislator that can amend a law as requested by petitioners.
The petition was filed by the Family Love Alliance, a group mostly comprising conservative Muslim women who have expressed concerns over, among other issues, casual sex, same-sex relationships and secularism in the country.
They requested the court to rule that those who partake in extramarital and gay sex should be punished.
The 467-page ruling received praise from human rights activists, who earlier said that the petition will make private life become public knowledge.
Legal aid organization LBH Masyarakat said in a statement that with the ruling, the court “upholds the right to privacy, refuses to contribute to overpopulation of prisons, prevents persecutions taking place against gender minority and women”.
The alliance’s chairwoman, Rita Hendrawaty Soebagio, however, denied that their petition was intended to enter into the private domain.
“The law shall stop in front of the bedroom’s doors or the house’s doors,” she said.
Human rights activists, however, stressed that in practice such an ideal is often breached, citing raids by conservative groups in rental rooms to find and intimidate unmarried or gay couples caught having sex behind closed doors.
Homosexuality is legal in Indonesia except in Aceh in the northernmost part of the country, the only province that applies Islamic sharia law since a local bylaw against same-sex relationships went into effect in 2014.
In May, two gay men in Aceh were publicly caned outside a mosque in front of thousands of spectators after being caught in bed together by vigilantes.