(Singapore) Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced on Sunday that his government would soon repeal the law criminalizing sex between men, which dates back to British colonial times.
Posted at 10:36 a.m.
Updated at 1:53 p.m.
“The government will repeal [la loi] and decriminalize sex between men. I believe it is the right thing to do and something most Singaporeans will now accept,” he said in a policy address on Sunday.
The Prime Minister made it clear that he would, however, continue to “defend” marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Section 377A of the Penal Code, a holdover from British colonial rule, provides for a maximum penalty of two years imprisonment for homosexual acts.
It is not enforced in practice, but for gay rights advocates it still denies members of the gay community their rights, despite the city-state’s increasingly modern culture.
The Prime Minister felt that the situation had changed.
” First step ”
Gay people “are now much more accepted” in Singapore, especially among young people, he said. “It is timely to ask ourselves again this important question: should private sex between two men be considered a crime? »
The repeal of the law “will bring the legislation in line with changing attitudes and, I hope, bring peace to gay Singaporeans,” said Lee Hsien Loong.
Associations for the defense of homosexual rights have welcomed this announcement.
“The repeal of Section 377A is the first step on the long road to full equality for LGBTQ+ people in Singapore,” wrote some 20 organizations in a joint text.
But “the real impact of the repeal will be determined by how the people of Singapore come to terms with it and act on it, in the days and months to come,” they added.
Several attempts to have this text annulled had failed in recent years, contrasting with the situation of homosexual rights elsewhere in Asia, such as in Taiwan – same-sex marriage has been legalized there since 2019 – or in India, which decriminalized sex between men in 2018.
Sanctuarization of heterosexual marriage
In February, Singapore’s Supreme Court ruled that the law would stand because of its “symbolic weight”, but on the principle that it “would not be proactively enforced”.
Several thousand people gathered in June in Singapore to demand better recognition of the rights of homosexuals.
The percentage of people who support a ban on same-sex relations has fallen from 55% in 2018 to 44% in 2022, according to a survey carried out in June by the Ipsos institute.
However, Lee Hsien Loong stressed that he did not want to change the law providing that civil marriage only consecrates the union of a man and a woman. “Most Singaporeans don’t want the repeal of the law to trigger a drastic change in our mores,” he said.
The government will thus amend the constitution to protect the conception of marriage as it is currently defined by law.
“Any initiative by the government to introduce new laws and constitutional amendments highlighting the unequal treatment of LGBTQ+ people is heartbreaking,” lamented the associations for the defense of homosexual rights. “Such a decision would undermine the secular nature of our constitution. […] and would tie the hands of future parliaments”.
A coalition of Protestant churches had expressed concern ahead of the prime minister’s speech about the possible repeal of the law, “an important moral and social landmark” in the face of “intolerant and aggressive LGBT activism that seeks to impose its ideology on Singaporean society”.