India High Court To Rule On Sodomy Law

Gay blog portal TowleRoad has the deets on the possibility of a ruling soon by the India High Court on that nation's sodomy law.

The Delhi high court last Friday completed hearing arguments in the case and had reserved its judgment on a petition to deciminalise private consensual sex between adults.

The seven-year-old petition is seeking to have Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code read down to exclude oral and anal sex between adults of any biological sex although the court hearings and media coverage tend to centre around sexual relations between adult men.

New Delhi-based gay rights activist and lawyer Aditya Bondyopadhyay explained in an email to Fridae that although Section 377, which criminalises “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal", is technically gender neutral and is equally applicable to heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, its use has been mainly to target gay sex between men.

The petition was filed in 2001 by Naz Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation working on HIV/AIDS and sexual health issues.

Gay activist and founder of NGO Humsafar afar, Ashok Row Kavi, clarified in a media report that the petition does not seek a repeal of Section 377 so that child sex offenses and male rape can continue to be prosecuted under the reinterpretation of the section, that would then exclude consensual sex between adults.

While rarely used in actual prosecutions today, the petition says that the almost 150-year-old law is used to target and harass lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, as well as HIV/AIDS activists and NGO workers. The law is also abused by the police to extort money and to blackmail gay men. The section, which dates back to 1860, provides for life imprisonment, a term exceeding 10 years and a fine.

It is the first time an Indian court will deliver a verdict for the section. Similar laws have been struck down since the 1980s in the US, UK, Australia, South Africa and the US. As with India, the former British Asian colonies of Bangladesh, Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Singapore continue to criminalise same sex relations under provisions similar to Section 377 present in each country’s penal code. Hong Kong repealed the section in 1991.

MadProfessah is always interested in advances in international LGBT rights, and in particular in countries that I have travelled to.