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News > Indonesia

Indonesia Bans Sex Outside of Marriage and Apostasy

  • Protests against reforms to the penal code in Indonesia, Dec. 6, 2022.

    Protests against reforms to the penal code in Indonesia, Dec. 6, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @CP24

Published 6 December 2022
Opinion

The legal changes will affect Indonesian citizens, foreign residents, and tourists visiting the country.

On Tuesday, the Indonesian Parliament approved reforms to the penal code that include jail sentences for extramarital sex, insults to the President, and apostasy, which is the formal abandonment of a religion.

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Strongly criticized by civil rights advocates, these reforms were widely supported by lawmakers in Indonesia, the country with the largest number of Muslims in the world.

Any form of extramarital sexual relations will be punished with up to one year in prison and insults to the president will carry a sentence of up to three years in prison.

Over the next two years, these reforms may be challenged before the Constitutional Court, explained Alif Nurwidiastomi, a member of the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation. 

This activist, however, does not expect the judges to stop the implementation of the reforms since that Constitutional Court maintains ties with President Joko Widodo.

The legal changes will affect Indonesian citizens, foreign residents, and tourists visiting the country. For all of them the prohibition of extramarital sex will be in force.

The reform to the Penal Code has generated protests since the first time it was tried to pass it in 2019, when dozens of people demonstrated against it outside the Parliament in Jakarta.

Critics of the reform denounce that the legal changes deepen "Islamization" in a country that still remembers the harshness of the dictatorship of Tommy Suharto (1967-1998).

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