After Indonesia Labeled LGBTQ+ 'Culture' a National Threat, Rights Groups Document a Surge in Attacks
A presidential regulation grouping the 'promotion of LGBTQ culture' with nonmilitary threats like terrorism has given cover to a wave of campus policies and street violence, Human Rights Watch and local advocates say.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto signed a national defense policy regulation late last year that formally classified the “promotion of LGBTQ culture” as a nonmilitary state threat, placing it in the same policy category as terrorism and drug trafficking. Eight months on, human rights researchers and local legal aid groups say the consequences of that classification are now visible on the ground — in university policies, in street violence, and in a public conversation that’s shifted from tolerance to open calls for criminalization.
What the regulation says, and what it authorizes
The regulation itself doesn’t create new criminal penalties for being LGBTQ+ — Indonesia’s national law doesn’t criminalize same-sex relationships between adults, and this policy doesn’t change that directly. What it does is instruct government bodies, down to regional administrations, to treat the spread of LGBTQ+ “culture” as a threat requiring a coordinated state response, the same framing used for organized crime and radicalization. Albert Wirya of the Legal Aid Institute, an Indonesian human rights organization, described the practical effect bluntly: the regulation “provides new legitimation both for the central government and regional administrations to enact legislation that penalises and discriminates against LGBTQ individuals,” even without a national criminal statute forcing the issue.
That distinction — a threat classification rather than a criminal law — matters because of how quickly it’s been picked up locally. Human Rights Watch has documented at least ten universities across Indonesia adopting policies restricting discussion of gender and sexual diversity on campus since the regulation took effect, treating the presidential framing as license to formalize discrimination that may previously have been informal.
The Bogor cases
The clearest evidence of what “cover” looks like in practice comes from Bogor, a city in West Java, where local advocacy groups have documented systematic attacks on at least fifteen transgender women by organized anti-LGBTQ+ groups. Survivors described beatings, public humiliation including being doused with urine, and forced public stripping — attacks reported as coordinated rather than isolated, and carried out with what victims describe as confidence that police would not meaningfully intervene.
That impression tracks with what Human Rights Watch has found more broadly. Meenakshi Ganguly, the organization’s Asia director, said authorities have been “looking the other way during an upsurge of attacks on LGBT university students” through Pride Month this year — a pattern of non-enforcement that functions, in effect, as tacit permission.
The rhetoric is getting sharper, not softer
The regulation has also emboldened calls for a harder legal line. The Indonesian Ulema Council, the country’s top Islamic clerical body, has called publicly for criminal penalties against LGBTQ+ people that would be harsher than the punishment currently prescribed for adultery under Indonesian law — a marker of how far the public argument has moved from “informal discrimination” toward “we should criminalize this outright.” Whether that translates into an actual change to the national criminal code remains an open question, but the fact that it’s being said aloud by an official religious body, in the wake of a presidential regulation, is itself a signal of where the political wind is blowing.
Why this matters beyond Indonesia
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and Southeast Asia’s largest economy, and its LGBTQ+ policy trajectory tends to influence how neighboring governments calibrate their own approach. A formal threat classification — even one framed around “culture” rather than individuals — sets a precedent other governments in the region can point to. It’s also a reminder that criminalization isn’t the only mechanism that puts LGBTQ+ people at risk: a threat designation, paired with police who decline to enforce protections that already exist, can produce the same result without ever changing the criminal code. For a community that was never fully safe in Indonesia to begin with, that’s a distinction without much practical difference.
