Although opposition to and stigmatization against homosexuality and LGBT individuals runs high throughout Indonesia, homosexual acts are not against the law. Except, that is, in Indonesia’s Aceh province, the only region of the Muslim-majority country that has been granted permission by the central government to enact and enforce its own strict interpretation of sharia law.
Although the law criminalizing homosexual acts in Aceh was enacted in 2015, it had not been used previously (except in the case of two women who were suspected of being lesbians and questioned by religious police after they were found hugging one another). But two men in Banda Aceh last month became the first to be arrested under the law, and they could face up to 100 lashes each, administered with a bamboo cane in front of a large public audience, an action that international NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) defines, based upon international rights conventions, as nothing less than torture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCytUEbIgC4
“The arrest and detention of these two men underscores the abuse imbedded in Aceh’s discriminatory, anti-LGBT ordinances,” said Phelim Kine, HRW’s deputy Asia division director, in a statement released on the HRW website. “These men had their privacy invaded in a frightening and humiliating manner and now face public torture for the ‘crime’ of their alleged sexual orientation.”
The two men, both in their twenties, were apprehended on March 28, not by the religious police but by a group of vigilantes who forcibly entered the house on the suspicion that the two were having same-sex relations. Cell phone footage of the raid circulating online, allegedly taken by one of the vigilantes, shows both men terrified while one attempts to call for help.
But help didn’t come. Instead, the two men were taken by the mob to a nearby sharia police facility, where authorities say the men confessed to being gay. They are now being held in custody until their punishment is determined.
According to the lead investigator on the case, Aceh’s Islamic Criminal Code calls for homosexual acts to be punished 100 lashes in public, which HRW notes constitutes torture under The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Indonesia ratified in 2005. That convention also protects the rights to privacy and prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, and other status such as sexual orientation, all principles which this case flagrantly violates.
President Joko Widodo, in response to a question about the rising intolerance and attacks against LGBT individuals last year, told the BBC “The police must act. There should be no discrimination against anybody.”
But what about when it is the police who and the government who are doing the discrimination?
“President Jokowi should urgently intervene in this case to demonstrate his stated commitment to ending discrimination against LGBT people,” Kine said. “Jokowi then needs to act to eliminate Aceh’s discriminatory ordinances so these outrageous arrests don’t happen again.”
There is also currently a petition before the Indonesian Constitutional Court to amend the criminal code is such a way that it would criminalize not just homosexual acts, but all sex outside of marriage.
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