A New Zealand MP has described the law on homosexuality in the Cook Islands as a colonial inheritance that does not reflect Pacific realities.
Photo: RNZ / Johnny Blades
A proposed amendment to the Cooks' Crimes Act maintains a clause under which men can be jailed for five years for homosexual acts.
A select committee initially struck out the clause, but backed down after public consultation.
However MP Louisa Wall said she hoped the Cook Islands decriminalised homosexuality.
Ms Wall, who is the architect of New Zealand's marriage equality laws, said members of the LGBTQI community were valued in Pacific cultures and the issue was not a matter of right and wrong but of equality and human rights.
"We are discriminating against takatapui. I mean we exist in all of our Pacific languages and cultures, we are valued members of our whanau whether it is fa'afafine or fakaleiti or however we express it in our languages," she said.
"And it is only through this imposition of colonisation and colonial law that we then started to other ourselves."
Louisa Wall said she thought the issue of decriminalising homosexuality was being conflated with marriage equality.
It took New Zealand 27 years after its homosexual law reform to pass its marriage equality laws, she said.
She hoped to meet with Cook Islands Associate Justice Minister Tingika Elikana to discuss those issues, while he was in Wellington on Parliament business.