The paper was presented at an international seminar held by the Aksara Foundation. He began his paper by saying, “The issue of defamation law has become a serious one in Indonesia in recent years, with a growing number of defamation cases exerting a significant chilling effect on freedom of expression.”

Later in the paragraph, he mentioned a famous criminal defamation case, the 2004 Tomy Winata vs. Tempo.

Five years have passed and defamation cases remain famous lawsuits filed by people or organizations: politicians and businessmen versus the media, politicians versus politicians, the public versus businesses and the last one, infotainment versus celebrity.

The majority of media organizations have been trying to eliminate criminal defamation from the Indonesian legal system.

This effort perhaps began mid 2000 when the media first experienced the consequences of their work in upholding freedom of the press.

In early 2006 a group of non-Jakartan journalists, who had experience in dealing with defamation cases, declared the need to remove criminal defamation from the Criminal Code (KUHP). When it arrived in Jakarta, it held a group tour, visited several Jakarta-based national media offices and discussed what they had experienced in their local newspapers.

They wanted to deliver an important message, the chilling effect of criminal defamation had not only occurred in the national but local press.  

Criminal defamation does weaken freedom of expression. It makes people reluctant to speak about an issue or subject that they think they need to deliver.

Even when your article/story/statement is based on fact, the consequence of being sued or reported to the police lurks. Take the Prita Mulyasari case for example.

Prita told her friends via email about the experience she had at Omni Hospital, based on facts as it was her own experience, but she was charged with defamation after writing the email.

Article 19 recorded that there were three successful attempts by Indonesians to have the criminal defamation articles deleted from Indonesia’s legal system.

In February 2006, the Supreme Court overturned the criminal defamation verdict of the lower court, which convicted then Tempo chief editor, Bambang Harimurti, and issued an edict saying that defamation cases involving the press should be dealt with through the press law, which does not envisage the criminal sanction.

I remember on that day that I congratulated a male colleague from the Press Legal Aid Foundation.

But he said that to have the criminal defamation completely removed was still far from reality. I disagreed with him at that moment, but now I think he was correct.

The second effort was in December 2006 when the Constitutional Court annulled three provisions in the Criminal Code that granted special protection to the president and the vice president on such criminal defamation cases.

The last effort was in July 2007, when the Constitutional Court ruled that articles 154 and 155 of the Criminal Code, which regulates criminal defamation against the government, were against the Constitution and therefore declared both articles as void.

But then the Electronic Information and Transaction (ITE) law came into effect in 2008, not to mention the existence of criminal defamation articles in the KUHP. The ITE  law also reassured the existence of criminal defamation.

It seems that Indonesian people and criminal defamation are long dear friends. It would be difficult to separate them as long as freedom of expression is a dream and the exercise of criticizing or being open to criticism is not a part of our tradition.

The writer is a program officer of ICT Media at the Hivos Foundation. This is her personal opinion.

Popular

To my horror, it’s just a movie!

RI, Australia strengthen partnership on taxing crypto assets

Pentagon chief congratulates Prabowo on being elected President