C

ivil movements are increasingly using the Internet to protect the rights of citizens, as public support of the recent cases of David Hartanto Widjaja and Prita Mulyasari has highlighted.

In the two cases, strangers rallied together on various Internet sites and blogs to acknowledge the injustices suffered by David and Prita.

In the Prita Mulyasari case, a rapid increase of supporters through the Internet - from 2,000 to 230,000 people in a week - and the strong public disapproval voiced in the media, helped raise the profile of the libel case.

Prita, a housewife who shared her complaints about Omni International Hospital through an email that was accidentally circulated on the Internet, was charged for libel last week.

David's case created a similar waves of public support and outrage.

David, an Indonesian student, was allegedly murdered at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

Utilizing the Internet, strangers supported the efforts of David's family to investigate the case and attend the Singaporean coroner court trials to prove that his death on March 2 was not suicide.

Public groups gathered funds, shared ideas about how to help support the case, sent invitations to rallies and also posted the newest findings of the investigation into his death on various websites.

Supporters of the case, who were mostly strangers to each other, were moved by blogs and notes written by people who did not even know David or his family.

Details of the case were made public by people such as Christovita Wiloto and Iwan Piliang.

Iwan, a blogger, said he felt he had to keep the public informed and wanted to trigger public awareness about David's case.

He sent stories from his blogs related to any progress of David's case to 20 mailing lists.

Christovita, an Indonesian based in Singapore, also keenly publicized the case.

He posted progress of the case in notes on his Facebook page and formed a group on the site specifically for supporters of the investigation.

The group now has more than 19,000 members.

High-profile figures such as the former badminton champion, Liem Swie King, even offered to be the group's online administrator.

As of Wednesday, the group had gathered funds from Facebook users that reached Rp 311.50 million (US$31,072).

The entire fund was donated to David's family's, who posted bank records of receiving the fund and details of how the money was spent, on the Internet.

Christovita said the family were reluctant to use public funds to cover the costs of their personal expenses incurred during investigation of the case.

Legal fees were the biggest expense, costing the family S$60,000 ($41,111).