The Supreme Court recently upheld the Penal Code provisions criminalising adultery in response to a petition which was filed a few weeks ago. The petition had triggered a vigorous debate on social media and had revealed a fascinating generational gap with regard to that issue. I do not want to get into detail the pros and cons of the debate for the purposes of this piece. However, for the record, I believe adultery should not be criminalised and I think the argument that adulterers should be jailed to keep the family together is so fundamentally illogical that it does not survive scrutiny. It should go without saying that you do not keep families together by putting one of the spouses in prison. And from my perspective, the constitutional protection of the family is not a license for criminalisation. However, what has got me thinking is the bigger picture here; the desire by people to criminalise behaviour they don’t like or do not approve of. “I hate X so people who do it should go to jail” is in my opinion a dangerous approach and it feels to me that jails crammed with non-violent defenders is a sub-optimal result for any nation. It’s a conversation that is happening in other countries as well- what is the role of incarceration in the twentieth century? What principle should we be affirming here? As a society, I think compassion should be a critical part of our decision making policy and deciding who should and shouldn’t go to jail is an obvious place to start. Adultery may be morally wrong, but imprisoning someone for that simply turns it into a collision of two moral wrongs. This principle applies to other cases as well. For example, most people see drug users as an addiction issue. Does it make sense to lock up addicts who have lost their way rather than try to help them? Whether you look at this from a secular point of view or a religious point of view, it seems to me that compassion should be a critical factor, especially in cases where the offender is not a danger to others. That is the kind of society we should be working towards. For many of these- adultery, homosexuality and other similar hot-button topics- the drive seems to be biblical in nature even though their proponents will often couch the language differently. However, Rwanda is a secular nation as set out in the constitution, and the State cannot be an agent for biblical enforcement. One assumes that if God objects so vigorously to the aforementioned activities, he will have his say when the time comes. I note, however, that the same people who use the Old Testament as their source to condemn homosexuality do not support stoning people for working on the Sabbath among many other biblical punishments. “But decriminalisation means people will be encouraged to continue their behaviour” the argument goes. If we have established that the behaviour in question should not result in depriving those people of their liberty then complaining that they won’t stop doing it becomes a circular argument. Society molds people according to its expectations, and we are obviously quite a conservative society. Whether the law penalises certain activities or not, it should be obvious that people will still be worried about what others will think. This societal pressure is probably more effective than legal pressure and this should give great comfort to the moral police. Depriving someone of their liberty- whether short-term or long-term- is not something that should be taken lightly and the Penal Code should be targeted towards serious crimes not tailored to address people’s discomfort with the activities of others. The writer is a social commentator based in Kigali. The views expressed in this article are of the author.
