INDIA: Supreme Court Considers Legalizing Gay Sex

Buzzfeed reports:

India could be on the brink of repealing a 157-year-old law that criminalizes gay sex in what is one of the world’s largest and longest-running LGBT legal battles. On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in a courtroom so full people barely had space to turn around, a bench of five judges from India’s highest court began hearing arguments against a law known as Section 377. The law was introduced under British rule in 1861 and states that all sexual activity apart from heterosexual intercourse is “against the order of nature.”

If the Supreme Court of India strikes down the law, it would transform gay rights in a country of more than 1 billion people. But the ruling could have huge repercussions in other countries — particularly the Commonwealth, an association of countries made up mostly of former territories of the British Empire — where LGBT activists are fighting similar legal battles against colonial-era penal codes.

Section 377 was first struck down by the Delhi High Court in 2009, only to be reinstituted by the Supreme Court in 2013.