Section A was a Singaporean law that criminalised sex between consenting adult males. It was introduced under British colonial rule in when it was added to the Penal Code by the colonial government.
It remained a part of the Singapore body of law after the Penal Code review of which removed most of the other provisions in Section It was subsequently repealed in its entirety in Prior to the repeal, the law, while retained de jure in the Penal Code, had been for many years de facto unenforced โ there had been no convictions for sex between consenting male adults in decades.
On 28 February , the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Singapore reaffirmed that A could not be used to prosecute men for having gay sex. The draft of the Indian Penal Code was largely his work. It took 23 years for his work to be reviewed by the commission and the Supreme Court judges in Mumbai, Calcutta, and Madras. The code was adopted in and took effect 1 January Macaulay's draft did not reflect existing Indian or other Asian cultures laws or customs.
It was largely a rewrite of the British Royal Commission's draft code. These in turn let future jurists redefine what these provisions actually punished. In the new Indian Penal Code, however, Section criminalised "carnal intercourse against the order of nature", derived from words attributed to Sir Edward Coke in the seventeenth century.
Section A " Outrages on decency" was added to the sub-title "Unnatural offences" in the Straits Settlements in Unnatural sex or sodomy was not defined in the Indian Penal Code drafted by the British. Legal records show that Indian legislators in the 19th and early 20th centuries interpreted "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" between individuals of all sexes โ the law being non-gender specific with its use of the word "whoever" to include anal sex , bestiality and, often after much courtroom deliberation, oral sex as well, i.
