Indonesia this week passed legislation to allow for the chemical castration of convicted pedophiles. It is the first Southeast Asian country to adopt such a measure, following countries such as Russia, Poland, and South Korea, along with a handful of American states.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo suggested a change to Indonesia’s laws following the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in May. After much debate, the country’s House of Representatives passed the “Sexual Violence Against Children Law” on Wednesday. In addition to chemical castration, the law authorizes a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison or death for repeat offenders, while allowing a court to tag pedophiles with a microchip.
“The law will put a smile on the faces of children across Indonesia because finally those who have fallen victim will get to see their abusers justly punished and those who could be future victims are finally protected,” Arist Merdeka Sirait, the chairman of the National Commission for Child Protection, told The Australian.
When a person is chemically castrated, they are administered libido-crushing drugs in hopes of curbing their sexual urges. The effects of chemical castration are reversible (as opposed to those of physical castration, which aren’t).
Yohana Susana Yembise, Indonesia’s Minister for women Empowerment and Child Protection who is drafting the law, told the BBC that Widodo’s administration was “praying” that the punishments will be effective. “Now we have the harshest punishments: the death penalty, life in prison, chemical castration, the public naming of perpetrators, and the electronic chip. These are now law, so even if you hate the idea of them everyone now has to support this.”
But while certain elements of Indonesian society have praised this newest addition to the country’s other extremely harsh laws — Indonesia remains one of the only countries on earth to still routinely kill drug offenders — some civil and human rights groups have decried the law. Human Rights Watch said that it considers “castration, chemical or otherwise, as a cruel and degrading form of corporal punishment.”
“Both the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both ratified by Indonesia, prohibit cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of punishment,” Andreas Harsono, Indonesia researcher for HRW, told Vocativ in an email. “The Indonesian government has an obligation to protect children from sexual predators, but those efforts shouldn’t involve abusive measures that violate international human rights law.”
Further, Harsono said that in addition to being costly, the law would be difficult to implement because doctors are planning on boycotting it. The Indonesian Doctors Association has said that chemically castrating individuals would violate its code of ethics and advised its members to not participate in doling out the procedure. “Indonesian doctors are justified in their opposition to chemical castration as a form of judicial punishment,” Harsono said.
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