Islamic authorities in Indonesia’s Aceh province will hit a 20-year-old man and a 21-year-old man 80 times with a cane for kissing and hugging each other in a public toilet. Witnesses in the Taman Sari city park informed police after seeing the men enter the same restroom in April, leading to the men’s immediate arrest and imprisonment.

Judge Rokhmadi M. Hum decided the brutal sentence in a recent closed-door session of the Islamic Shariah District Court, ABC News reported. The judge decided the two college students had “legally and convincingly” violated Islamic law by their actions.

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Prosecutors had sought to punish the men with 85 cane strokes each, but Hum reduced the punishment because the accused men were polite in court, cooperated with authorities, had no previous convictions, and had already served four months in prison.

The cane used to punish them will be 0.5 inches wide, 3.9 feet long, and soaked overnight in water to prevent breaking or splinters, according to World Corporal Punishment Research. Caning victims are stripped naked, tied to a wooden frame, and bent over at a 90-degree angle with their buttocks exposed to receive each stroke (which occurs every 30 seconds at the caning officer’s maximum strength). The blows often break the skin and damage muscle, causing bleeding and permanent scarring.

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A medical officer and the superintendent of prisons are required to be present for the caning to ensure that the victim doesn’t pass out and that the punishment is inflicted correctly. Victims have described the pain as worse than excruciating. After the caning, the victim is given antiseptic lotion, painkillers, and antibiotics to heal the wounds. Victims cannot sit or lie on their backs for about a week or more afterwards due to lingering pain.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both condemned caning as “cruel,” “inhuman,” and “degrading.” Critics argue that the practice violates international treaties against torture.

This caning follows another for similar offenses, carried out in the region last February. Caning is used to punish for a variety of “morality offenses” in Aceh, including gay sex, sex between unmarried people, gambling, alcohol consumption, women who wear tight-fitting clothes, and men who skip Friday prayers.

Indonesia allowed the Aceh province to implement Islamic law in 2006 as part of a peace deal to end a separatist war, ABC News reported. In 2015, Aceh expanded the enforcement of its Islamic laws to non-Muslims (an estimated 1% of its population).

Human Rights Watch reported that authorities in Aceh publicly flogged two gay men 77 times each in 2021 after a mob raided their apartment in November and caught the men having sex before turning them over to police.

While Aceh province’s Shariah Law is extreme in its treatment of LGBTQ+ “offenders,” Indonesia’s laws addressing LGBTQ+ people in general were described as a “human rights disaster” by the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society in Melbourne. 

Indonesia’s government crackdown on its LGBTQ+ citizens has been going on for years now. After publicly humiliating 141 men arrested in a gay sauna, the country’s capitol city founded an anti-LGBTQ+ police force, the government proposed a law to ban all LGBTQ TV content, the Air Force called LGBTQ identity “a mental disorder,” the country tried to shut down an international gay sporting event and one region arrested 12 transgender women and shaved their heads to “make them men.”

In 2022, two Indonesian soldiers were kicked out of the army and were sentenced to seven months in jail for having gay sex. In 2020, nine men were arrested at a “gay party” in a Jakarta hotel raid and charged under anti-pornography laws, which can carry a 15-year sentence.

Economists estimate that Indonesia’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies have cost the country anywhere from $900 million to $12 billion in lost revenue.

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