Unnatural sex or sodomy was not defined in the Indian Penal Code drafted by the British. : 20 Both sections were absorbed unchanged into the Singapore Penal Code when the latter was passed by Singapore's Legislative Council on 28 January 1955. Section 377A "(Outrages on decency" was added to the sub-title "Unnatural offences" in the Straits Settlements in 1938. In the new Indian Penal Code, however, Section 377 criminalised "carnal intercourse against the order of nature", derived from words attributed to Sir Edward Coke in the seventeenth century. : 18 Under Buddhist and Hindu law in most of Asia, consensual intercourse between members of the same sex was never an offence. These in turn let future jurists redefine what these provisions actually punished. : 11 The adopted draft included a Section 377 (quoted above), but there were many ambiguities in the section, including the question of what had to penetrate what. It was largely a rewrite of the British Royal Commission's 1843 draft code. Macaulay's draft did not reflect existing Indian (or other Asian cultures) laws or customs. The code was adopted in 1860 and took effect 1 January 1862. It took 23 years for his work to be reviewed by the commission and the Supreme Court judges in Mumbai, Calcutta, and Madras. The 1837 draft of the Indian Penal Code was largely his work. : 10–11 Lord Thomas Macaulay was appointed to chair the commission. The British Parliament formed the Indian Law Commission in 1833. The bill was assented by President Halimah Yacob on 27 December 2022 and gazetted on 3 January 2023, thus Section 377A was struck off the books.īackground The Indian Penal Code Lord Thomas Macaulay, who chaired the commission that introduced laws such as 377A. On 29 November 2022, the Parliament of Singapore passed a bill to repeal Section 377A. On 21 August 2022, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced during the annual National Day Rally that the government intends to repeal Section 377A, effectively ending criminalisation both de facto and de jure. That same year, an Ipsos survey found that 44% of Singapore residents supported retaining the law, with 20% opposing it and the remaining 36% being ambivalent. On 28 February 2022, the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Singapore reaffirmed that 377A could not be used to prosecute men for having gay sex. While a small number of people were convicted under the section for private consensual acts between adults from 1988 until 2007, enforcement effectively ceased outright following the Penal Code review, despite the retention of section 377A from 2007 to 2022. Prior to the repeal, the law, while retained de jure in the Penal Code, had been for many years de facto unenforced – there had been no convictions for sex between consenting male adults in decades. It was subsequently repealed in its entirety in 2023. It remained a part of the Singapore body of law after the Penal Code review of 2007 that removed most of the other provisions in Section 377. It was introduced under British colonial rule in 1938 when it was added to the Penal Code by the colonial government. Section 377A was a Singaporean law that criminalised sex between consenting adult males.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |