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wo months before the end of the current term, the House of Representatives has reopened debate on a contentious bill on state secrecy, four years after deliberations were dropped in response to criticisms voiced by various groups that the bill would violate human rights.

House Commission I overseeing defense, foreign affairs and information held a meeting with human rights organizations '€” namely the Institute for Research and Advocacy (ELSAM); Imparsial; and the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) '€” on Monday, which all urged the House to drop the debate.

Civil groups argued that not only did the current draft of the bill infringe upon existing legislation, but that it contained articles that would grant the government excessive power to criminalize civilians in order to protect state secrets.

Those articles included Article 6, whereby the power to determine what constituted a state secret would be given to the president.

'€œIn certain situations, the president can define something as a state secret,'€ the article says.

Elsam director Indri Saptaningrum argued that this would encourage arbitrary interpretations by the government that could trigger the creation of an inexhaustible list of state secrets.

'€œIt is important to define what kind of information is considered a state secret and what kind of information is not because a loose definition will potentially violate the peoples'€™ right to information,'€ Indri said.

She also urged lawmakers to discontinue discussions, saying that the bill'€™s stipulations were already regulated by other laws such as the 2008 Law on Public Information, where Article 17 included information related to defense strategy, intelligence operations and the state'€™s encryption system regarding public consumption.

Concurring with Elsam, Imparsial'€™s Poengky Indarti said that the bill was a threat to democracy and freedom of the press.

President Yudhoyono ordered a halt to deliberations on the bill in 2009 following protests from civil society groups. He called on the Defense Ministry, which drafted the bill, to reexamine its substance.

Commission I deputy chairman Tubagus Hasanuddin, who is politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and who chaired the meeting on Tuesday, claimed that discussions were only preliminary, which to him reflected the bill'€™s gloomy prospects.

'€œWe only aimed to get input today. It doesn'€™t necessarily mean that we will pass the bill because we practically have no time left to do so due to a number of priority bills to be completed before the end of the term,'€ he said.