Amanda Hodge – The UN Human Rights chief has urged Indonesia not to go "backwards on human rights" by introducing laws banning sex outside marriage and gay sex, and warned of "rising levels of incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence" across the country.
Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said while Indonesia was "one of the most progressive states in the region on human rights", he was deeply concerned by proposed revisions to the country's criminal code that would criminalise large sections of the poor, who did not have marriage certificates, and the marginalised.
"These discussions betray strains of intolerance seemingly alien to Indonesian culture that have made inroads here," Prince Zeid said at the end of a three-day visit to Jakarta, where he met President Joko Widodo, senior ministers and activists.
"LGBTI Indonesians already face increasing stigma, threats and intimidation. The hateful rhetoric against this community that is being cultivated seemingly for cynical political purposes will only deepen their suffering and create unnecessary divisions," he said.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said he had discussed the issue with Mr Joko, who told him Indonesia would stand by its obligations to all its people but also that there was a "mood inside the country regarding LGBTI".
"If we expect not to be discriminated against on the basis of our religious beliefs, colour, race or gender, if Muslim societies expect others to fight against Islamophobia, we should be prepared to end discrimination at home too," Prince Zeid said, adding he did not accept the argument that "this is our culture".
"If it is the culture, it would have been there from the very beginning. If it's being introduced, now it has come from somewhere else," he said.
Representatives from Indonesia's 10 political parties will meet tomorrow to seek consensus on the legal revisions, which are among 800 amendments proposed by a parliamentary committee reviewing the country's 100-year-old criminal code.
If all are agreed, the bill could be sent to the House of Representatives for a vote as early as this month.
The proposed laws are part of a wider wave of hostility towards the LGBTI community that increasingly has been targeted by Indonesian politicians seeking political advantage by appealing to rising conservative Islamic sentiments.
Last week police in Aceh, the only Indonesian province that enforces sharia law, raided transgender beauty salons, cut the hair of 12 transgender women and forced them to act "like men".
Prince Zeid said other areas of concern were the country's "ill-defined blasphemy law" – used to jail ethnic-Chinese, Christian former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama – its drug laws, and human rights violations in West Papua province and against communities displaced by large-scale logging and mining interests.