The High Court in the Indonesian city of Jambi yesterday acquitted a 15-year-old girl upon appeal after she had previously been sentenced to six months in prison for an illegal abortion despite her pregnancy being the result of rape.
The court ruled that the girl’s previous sentence, given last month, should not have stood because she had an abortion under forced circumstances.
“The court found that a child who is exempt from criminal punishment was proven to have carried out an abortion. But she did it under forced circumstances. So we absolved the child of all punishment,” Jambi High Court Judge Jhon Diamond Tambunan wrote in a release, as picked up by Detik yesterday.
The girl’s brother, who was sentenced to two years in prison for raping his sister on multiple occasions, has not indicated whether or not he will appeal his sentence. Their mother is still under police investigation under the suspicion that she helped carry out her daughter’s abortion.
Abortion is illegal in Indonesia unless a woman’s life is at risk or under certain circumstances if she is raped.
The law requires that an abortion must be performed by a registered professional no later than six weeks into a pregnancy, and the woman must undergo counselling.
The girl, who was raped repeatedly by her brother, had the abortion about six months after becoming pregnant.
Mirna Novita Amir, one of the teenager’s lawyers, welcomed the decision, saying jail was not the place for a rape victim.
“I see a teenager that should not have been charged, but had to go to jail even though she was a victim of her older brother,” she told AFP.
The girl will receive counselling for psychological trauma and eventually resume her schooling, Mirna Amir added.
Police arrested the siblings in June after a male fetus was discovered at a local palm oil plantation.
Critics say Indonesia’s abortion laws restrict women’s rights to reproductive health and lead many to undertake dangerous abortions at illegal clinics.
Abortions account for between 30 and 50 percent of maternal deaths in the country, according to a 2013 World Health Organisation report.
With additional reporting from AFP