India’s Supreme Court to review 2013 order criminalizing gay sex 

NEW DELHI, Jan. 8 — India’s Supreme Court Monday said that it would reconsider its 2013 order which criminalized gay sex in this country by upholding a colonial-era law.

A three-judge bench, led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, said the apex court’s 2013 judgment upholding the validity of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code, which considers sex between consenting adults of same gender a crime, appeared to hurt individual sexual preferences. “Choice can’t be allowed to cross the boundaries of law but the confines of law can’t trample or curtail the inherent right embedded in an individual under Article 21, the right to life and liberty,” the court said.

“The 2013 judgment needs to be reconsidered,” the court said in the wake of a petition filed by five members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community.” The court also referred the petition to a higher bench. In December 2013, the top court set aside a Delhi High Court order in 2009
decriminalizing homosexuality. The Delhi high court had then overturned Section 377 of Indian Penal Code, the 148-year-old colonial law which described a same-sex relationship as an “unnatural offence”. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code defines homosexual acts as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”. Under the law, homosexual acts are punishable by a 10-year prison term. – XINHUA