Adultery laws

The head of the United Nations expert body charged with identifying ways to eliminate laws that discriminate against women or are discriminatory to them in terms of implementation or impact, Kamala Chandrakirana, has stated that: "Adultery must not be classified as a criminal offence at all".

[5] There are fifteen[6] countries in which stoning is authorized as lawful punishment, though in recent times it has been legally carried out only in Iran and Somalia.

[8] Al-Shabaab, a jihadist fundamentalist group based in East Africa (mainly Somalia) and Yemen also implements an extreme form of Sharia.

[8] In jurisdictions where adultery is illegal, punishments vary from fines (for example in the US state of Rhode Island[9]) to caning in parts of Asia.

[10][11] In fifteen countries[6] the punishment includes stoning, although in recent times it has been legally enforced only in Iran and Somalia.

For instance act 266 of the Penal Code of South Sudan reads: "Whoever, has consensual sexual intercourse with a man or woman who is and whom he or she has reason to believe to be the spouse of another person, commits the offence of adultery [...]".

[13] Similarly, under the adultery law in India (Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code, until overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018) it was a criminal offense for a man to have consensual sexual intercourse with a married woman, without the consent of her husband (no party was criminally punished in case of adultery between a married man and an unmarried woman).

Proving adultery under Muslim law can be a very difficult task as it requires the accuser to produce four eyewitnesses to the act of sexual intercourse, each of whom should have a good reputation for truthfulness and honesty.

The matter could be settled out of court, with bodily harm to the accused or assorted punishments affecting his social standing.

[19] On 27 September 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code, the law which criminalized adultery, as unconstitutional.

[38] Extramarital sex without the consent of one's partner can be a valid grounds for monetary penalty on government employees, as ruled by the Central Administrative Tribunal.

[41] Previously, adultery was criminalized in 1953, and violators were subject to two years in prison, with the aim of protecting women from divorce.

The Ordinance has been particularly controversial because it requires a woman making an accusation of rape to provide extremely strong evidence to avoid being charged with adultery herself.

In recent years high-profile rape cases in Pakistan have given the Ordinance more exposure than similar laws in other countries.

[49][50] Among the last European countries to decriminalise adultery were Italy (1969), West Germany (1969), Malta (1973), Luxembourg (1974), France (1975), Spain (1978), Portugal (1982), Greece (1983), Belgium (1987), Switzerland (1989), and Austria (1997).

[64] Examples of women who have been executed for adultery in Medieval and Early Modern Europe include Maria of Brabant, Duchess of Bavaria (in 1256), Agnese Visconti (in 1391), Beatrice Lascaris di Tenda (in 1418), Anne Boleyn (in 1536), and Catherine Howard (in 1542).

[65] The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has had the opportunity to rule in recent years on several cases involving the legitimacy of firing a person from their job due to adultery.

Adultery has been decriminalized in most of these countries, including Paraguay (1990),[67] Chile (1994),[68] Argentina (1995),[69] Nicaragua (1996),[70] Dominican Republic (1997),[71] Brazil (2005),[72] and Haiti (2005).

[73] In some countries, adultery laws have been struck down by courts on the ground that they discriminated against women, such as Guatemala (1996), where the Guatemalan Constitutional Court struck down the adultery law based both on the Constitution's gender equality clause and on human rights treaties including CEDAW;[74] and Venezuela in 2016.

Under federal law enacted in 1994, sexual conduct between consenting adults (18 years of age or older) is their private matter throughout Australia,[78] irrespective of marital status.

[89] States which have decriminalised adultery in recent years include West Virginia (2010),[90] Colorado (2013),[91] New Hampshire (2014),[87][92] Massachusetts (2018),[93] Utah (2019),[94] Idaho (2022),[95] Minnesota (2023),[96] and New York (2024).

[98][99] When passing the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, the 6th United States Congress extended all of the criminal laws of Maryland and Virginia to the respective territory within the District that each state had ceded to the federal government under Article I, Section VIII,[100] and adultery had been an indictable offense in Maryland since the passage of a provincial law in 1715.

[105] The enforceability of adultery laws in the United States is unclear following Supreme Court decisions since 1965 relating to privacy and sexual intimacy of consenting adults.

[107] Six U.S. states (Hawaii, North Carolina, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Utah) allow the possibility of the tort action of alienation of affections (brought by a deserted spouse against a third party alleged to be responsible for the failure of the marriage).

[108][109] In a highly publicized case in 2010, a woman in North Carolina won a $9 million suit against her husband's mistress.

Much of the criticism comes from libertarianism, the consensus among whose adherents is that government must not intrude into daily personal lives and that such disputes are to be settled privately rather than prosecuted and penalized by public entities.

Opponents of adultery laws regard them as painfully archaic, believing they represent sanctions reminiscent of nineteenth-century novels.

[116] A Joint Statement by the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women in law and in practice in 2012, stated:[74] The United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women in law and in practice is deeply concerned at the criminalization and penalization of adultery whose enforcement leads to discrimination and violence against women.Concerns exist that the existence of "adultery" as a criminal offense (and even in family law) can affect the criminal justice process in cases of domestic assaults and killings, in particular by mitigating murder to manslaughter,[117] or otherwise proving for partial or complete defenses in case of violence.