LGBT Rights and the Constitutional Court

Abstract

This chapter explains the decision of the Constitutional Court in a case concerning the rights of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community (the LGBT case) decided in 2017. The petitioners had asked the Court to interpret several provisions of the Criminal Code including Article 292 that punishes adults who commit obscene acts against children. The petitioners argued that the article should also criminalize relations between same-sex adults. In a 5–4 decision, the Court rejected a petition by conservative Muslim organizations. In this case, the Court found that the legislature rather than the Court was the proper institution to consider their argument for the expansion of the scope of criminal law. This may sound like the Court partly agreed with the petitioners. However, this chapter suggests that by deferring the decision to the legislature, the Court still protected the rights of LGBT people; the Court knew that parliament would not be able to gain sufficient support to pass amendments to the penal code. This decision was pragmatic because it balanced the Court’s need to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of a conversative and religious public with the need to prevent the criminalization of the LGBT community.

LGBTQI Rights crucified in Indonesia? New Penal Code anti missio Dei?

“…Much like the Jewish conservatives manipulated political authorities to execute Christ, intolerant Islamic conservatives are metaphorically accused of not only infiltrating Indonesian political institutions to persecute the LGBTQI community, but even metaphorically crucifying their right to exist. This comes after Indonesia's Constitutional Court rejected the criminalization of same-sex relationships demanded by conservative groups in 2018 (Satrio, 2022;Wieringa, 2019), but has since deceptively succeeded in influencing Parliament to operationalize such ordeal through the penal code.…”