JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia’s Constitutional Court has approved in part a petition brought by an environment campaigner, it said on Tuesday, opening the way for a legal change to bar the government or a company filing defamation complaints in the event of criticism.
Human rights activists have said the Electronic Information and Transaction law is a threat to freedom of speech in the world’s third-largest democracy and that the government has used it to criminalise its critics.
Environment activist Daniel Frits Maurits Tangkilisan had petitioned the Constitutional Court to revoke an article in the law regulating defamation.
The court did not revoke the article but banned a “government, company, institution, or groups with specific identities” from filing defamation complaints against an individual, judge Arief Hidayat said.
He said defamation complaints can only be filed by the person who has been defamed and the court’s action aimed to ensure legal certainty and prevent “arbitrariness by the law enforcer”.
Indonesia’s law minister did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Any ruling by Constitutional Court is effective immediately and legally binding.
Tangkilisan’s lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis praised the ruling, saying a good government still need critics, local newspaper Kompas reported.
Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International in Indonesia, also said the ruling was positive.
“We can still put our hope to the court in preventing the setback of civil liberty in Indonesia,” he told Reuters.
Among prominent instances of defamation cases in Indonesia, two rights activists were charged with defamation under the law in 2023 after being accused of defaming a senior cabinet minister. They were then acquitted.
A singer and opposition figure Ahmad Dhani was sentenced to a year in prison in 2019 under the law after calling political rivals idiots in an online video.
(Reporting by Ananda Teresia; editing by Barbara Lewis)
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