India Supremes Decline to Review Colonial-Era Ban on Sodomy

LOS ANGELES—A two-judge panel of the Indian Supreme Court has issued an order declining to review its December ruling reinstating a law from the colonial era that outlaws "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal." Though written to apply to both genders and more than one species, Section 377 of India's penal code, which had been overturned by a lower court in 2009, is widely interpreted to refer to sex among gay humans. According to Reuters, "The government and seven human rights groups had filed petitions asking the court to review its decision, in the hope it would be overturned." Those hopes were dashed today when "Justice H. L. Dattu and Justice Sudhansu Jyoti Mukhopadhaya issued a brief order declaring, 'The Review Petitions are dismissed," reported BuzzFeed. According to BuzzFeed, while most review petitions fail because they are petitioning a court that had already ruled on the issue under appeal, in this situation there was room for hope because "One of the judges who authored the Supreme Court ruling resigned just after the December decision was issued, meaning there was a new judge weighing the review petitions." In the aftermath of the decision, the coalition opposing the law expressed its frustration in a Facebook post, noting, “This decision is a disappointing setback to the rights of LGBT persons and, indeed, to the fundamental rights of all Indians. Today’s decision represents an abdication by the judiciary to protect the spirit of the constitution. It is a failure to assert that fundamental rights hold for all persons.” There is one last option before the high court, but it's a long shot. "This is called a curative petition, a motion in which the senior judges of the full Supreme Court are asked to intervene in cases where a ruling violates basic rights," reported BuzzFeed. "But some activists said privately before Tuesday’s ruling that if the review petitions were rejected, they held little hope that a curative petition would succeed." In December, in its original ruling, the court opined that only parliament can change the law, which carries with it a punishment of up to 10 years in jail. On the flip side of archaic laws, The Guardian reports that the last law against sodomy in Europe has finally been repealed. The last remaining prohibition against sodomy in Europe was repealed Monday. "Northern Cyprus, the last jurisdiction in Europe where gay sex between consenting adults was illegal, has voted to remove the offence from its statute books," it reported. "Turkish Cypriot deputies passed an amendment on Monday repealing a colonial-era law that punished homosexual acts with up to five years in prison."