SINGAPORE: A veteran Singapore diplomat on Thursday (Sep 6) called for Singapore’s gay community to challenge a law that bans gay sex in the country, following India’s scrapping of the same British colonial-era legislation.
Tommy Koh, who is Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made the comments in response to a Facebook post by a senior Singapore-based academic on India’s landmark ruling on Thursday.
Simon Chesterman, dean of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, shared a New York Times story on the ruling, congratulating a former classmate and others on the change.
“I would encourage our gay community to bring a class action to challenge the constitutionality of Section 377A,” Koh wrote.
Previous legal challenges in 2014 on the constitutionality of the law failed. Reminded of this by another Facebook user, Koh said from his verified account: “Try again”.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has previously said that most Singaporeans would want to keep the statute and that Singapore society “is not that liberal on these matters”.
Under Singapore’s law 377A, a man found to have committed an act of “gross indecency” with another man could be jailed for up to two years, although prosecutions are rare. The law does not apply to homosexual acts between women.
