In a recent legislation, Indonesia’s parliament banned having sex before getting married (fornication) or outside marriage, with any other person asides from your wife or husband (marital cheating or adultery).
The country criminalized all forms of sexual activity outside the confines of marriage and made it punishable by up to one-year imprisonment.
The new law prohibiting people not married from having sex applies to both citizens, and tourists. It is unclear if it applies to expats too. However, its execution will not be immediately applied, a stay of three years was set to allow for protocols to be concluded.
Why Indonesia Banned Unmarried People From Having Sex
Defending the new law, Indonesia’s spokesman for the justice ministry, Albert Aries, said the country banned people from having sex before or outside to “protect the institution of marriage and Indonesian values, as well as the privacy of the community”.
Indonesia’s legislators had expressed a desire to revise their laws; which were referred to as colonial laws. According to Bambang Wuryanto, the head of the parliamentary commission in charge of revising the legislation, he had remarked that “the old code belongs to Dutch heritage … and is no longer relevant now.” There was no opposition in the parliament when passing the ban on having sex before marriage into law.
Reacting to the news, civil societies say that forcing people to stop having sex before/outside marriage is an infringement on their fundamental human rights and freedom.
The new code/law also bans people of the opposite sex from living together without marriage (cohabitation), abandoning or leaving their religious or political belief or principle, insulting the president, or going against the nation’s ideology.
Indonesia practices strict Islamic laws, being one of the world’s largest Muslim-dominated countries. Some of the activities already banned include alcohol drinking, gambling, gay/homosexuality, and adultery. Other activities also banned in Indonesia include; the practice of witchcraft/black magic or voodoo and staging protest without notification.
