Tourists could find themselves in hot legal water if they have extra-marital sex in Indonesia.
Today the country's parliament unanimously passed a revision of the country’s penal code which criminalises sex outside of marriage for citizens as well as foreigners.
It also prohibits promotion of contraception, such as condoms, and bans defamation of the president and state institutions.
The new laws are set to take effect in three years.
Andreas Harsono, a senior Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch, warned that the law change could deter tourists from visiting.
“The danger of oppressive laws is not that they’ll be broadly applied, it’s that they provide avenue for selective enforcement,” he said.
Many hotels, including in tourism areas such as Bali and metropolitan Jakarta, will risk losing visitors, he added.
“These laws let police extort bribes, let officials jail political foes, for instance, with the blasphemy law,” Harsono said.
The amended code says sex outside marriage is punishable by a year in jail and cohabitation by six months.
Adultery charges must be based on police reports lodged by a spouse, parents or children.
The legislation change marks a big crackdown on freedoms for Indonesians.
The new legislation means citizens can face a 10-year prison term for associating with organisations that follow Marxist-Leninist ideology and a four-year sentence for spreading communism.
Human rights groups criticised some of the revisions as overly broad or vague and warned that adding them to the code could penalise normal activities and threaten freedom of expression and privacy rights.
During fierce opposition, lawmakers eventually agreed to remove an article proposed by Islamic groups that would have made gay sex illegal.
The legislation also restores a ban on insulting a sitting president or vice president, state institutions and the national ideology; insults to a sitting president must be reported by the president and can lead to up to three years in jail.
President Joko Widodo is widely expected to sign the law, but it is likely to take effect gradually over a period of up to three years, according to Deputy Minister of Law and Human Rights Edward Hiariej.
