Law Makers of Indonesia unanimously approve the new criminal code
JAKARTA: Indonesia’s parliament passed a long-awaited overhaul of the country’s criminal code on Tuesday, a sweeping overhaul that critics say is a major setback for human rights and freedom of expression in the South Asian country.
Indonesia’s parliament approved the new law, three years after President Joko Widodo defended a similar law after massive protests involving tens of thousands of young people, who said the law threatens freedom.
The new penal system, which also applies to foreigners in the country, reinstates the ban on insulting the president, state institutions, or Indonesia’s national ideology known as Pancasila.
“We have done our best to take into account the important points and the different points of view that are being debated,” Yasonna Laoly, the minister of law and human rights, told parliament. “However, the time has come for us to make a historic decision to reform the penal code and abandon the colonial penal code we inherited.”
The reform of the penal code, which started in the Dutch colonial region, has failed for several decades as the legislature in the world’s largest Muslim country has struggled to change the culture and norms of the country and the penal code.
The President will register a new penal code and will not apply it immediately to allow the development of the implementation of the text, with a transition period set at a maximum of three years. It can be challenged before the Constitutional Court.
The new law, critics say, will limit freedom of speech, including mandatory police powers for public demonstrations, without which protesters can be jailed for up to six months. Tunggal Pawestri, a women’s rights activist and president of the Hivos Foundation, told Arab News, “There is still a penal code that still threatens civil liberties, and many articles threaten civil liberties.
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Pawestri acknowledged that progress has been made since national protests in 2019, when opponents of the law said the legislative process was illogical and had a history of oppressing minorities. Pawestri added, “Although they said they were open and tried to include input from the local community, we believe that was not their best effort.” “We screamed and spoke our minds, but they almost didn’t listen to us.”
Writers in national newspapers have criticized the new law, including the daily Koran Tempo, saying the code has an “authoritarian” tone and could spell “disaster” in the future.
Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said that the new laws are “oppressive” because they open the way for “invasion of privacy and coercive options that will make the police blacks take bribes from officials to harass and imprison politicians’.
