Indonesia has passed a new, controversial criminal code that entails outlawing cohabitation and sex outside marriage and cohabitation, after the country’s parliament unanimously voted on Tuesday.
Sex outside marriage will potentially bear a one-year prison term, though restrictions on who can lodge a formal complaint are in place. The country that has seen an exponential in religious conservatism in recent years also suggests that parents of children who are cohabiting have the authority to report them.
The new code also applies to foreign residents and tourists, bans cohabitation before marriage, apostasy and outlines penalties for insulting the president/state institutions or expressing views that counter the national ideology.
The new code also expands an existing blasphemy law and keeps a five-year prison term for deviations from the central tenets of Indonesia’s six recognized religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The code still needs approval from the president, and the government says it will not be fully implemented for several years.
Rights groups criticized some of the revisions as overly broad or vague and warned that adding them to the code could penalize normal activities and threaten freedom of expression and privacy rights.
