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une 21 marked the 20th anniversary of the shuttering of Tempo, Detik and Editor at the hands of New Order authorities.

 The ban came on the heels of an article run by Tempo that probed allegedly shady dealings surrounding then vice president BJ Habibie'€™s procurement of 39 retired East German warships for the Indonesian Navy.

With the story'€™s hard-hitting critique of the vice president, Tempo found itself suddenly thrust outside the government favor '€” a precarious position to be in back in 1994, when the 1982 Press Law tethered publishing rights to the government'€™s good grace.

Indeed, without the SIUPP '€” a government-issued publishing license '€” any published work was deemed illegal and guilty parties were subject to punishment by law.

Neither then president Soeharto nor the information minister at the time, Harmoko, offered definitive justification for the sudden Tempo ban, waffling between allegations of SIUPP permit violations and vague assertions that the report had threatened national security.

But the timing of the ban, coming just a few days after the story ran, was auspicious, and some analysts say that the real reason was that the report had undermined the credibility of Habibie, who as Soeharto'€™s hand-picked leader of the Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals Association (ICMI), was at that time charged with a very important task: consolidating a new base of political support for the Soeharto regime, whose longtime base of military support was showing cracks.

In any case, Tempo'€™s SIUPP was revoked, and in a flash, one of Indonesia'€™s most prominent news publications was dissolved.

Four years later, the New Order regime was toppled by a wave of popular protests, setting the stage for dramatic democratic reform.

 The 1999 Press Law, which denied the government the right to '€œlicense, regulate, censor or ban the press'€, and established an independent Press Council to adjudicate media disputes, was one of the most significant reforms of the time. It tipped the scales in favor of civil society, and today'€™s media landscape '€” where news outlets routinely lambaste government officials for poor performance or corruption '€” is completely unrecognizable from the one where government was free to muzzle dissent.

Indeed, while other speech concerns have surfaced, such as bias in the media '€” where a handful of ultra-wealthy, politically connected moguls have risen to dominate the media market '€” the capacity for formal government intervention in speech has been drastically reduced since Soeharto'€™s ouster.

 And yet, despite the scrapping of the SIUPP and the establishment of tighter media protections, threats to free speech in Indonesia remain.  A few red flags stick out:

In 2006, the House of Representatives voted to implement a new law that, among other effects, handed regulation of broadcast media back to the government.

The same law placed limitations on the broadcast of foreign news, because according to the communications and information minister at the time, Sofyan Djalil, some of the foreign content was deemed '€œunsuitable'€ for Indonesian audiences.

This is just one of several attempts by the government to regulate what media content is acceptable for Indonesian society.

In October 2011, the passage of the State Intelligence Law established penalties of 10 years in prison and fines of more than Rp 10 million (US$834) for those convicted of revealing or disseminating '€œstate secrets'€. The law left the definition of '€œstate secrets'€ open to broad interpretation, and granted the State Intelligence Agency (BIN) expanded powers of public surveillance.

Perhaps the most controversial legislation to have passed over the last decade was the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law, which authorizes pre-trial detention for individuals accused of Internet commentary deemed defamatory, and establishes a  maximum nine-month prison sentence and fines of up to Rp 1 billion for those found guilty of Internet defamation.

In the law'€™s original form, those found guilty of defamation under the ITE Law were subject to a maximum sentence of six years in prison.

This defamation law, as well as those found in the Criminal Code (KUHP), encourage self-censorship in the media, as litigation proceedings can be expensive, drag on for years, and in a judicial system where even the chief of the Constitutional Court can be pulled into the shadowy world of bribery, unfairly influenced by special interests.

Furthermore, though by international standards the veracity of a claim is a defense against allegations of slander aimed at public officials, that is not so in Indonesia, where if a person'€™s speech is deemed sufficiently insulting, that person is liable to prosecution even if they'€™re telling the truth.

With these laws as starting points, it'€™s not too difficult to imagine a new political elite antagonistic to a free press having a good starting point for stifling speech it doesn'€™t like.

So, as Indonesians prepare to cast their votes for their new president on July 9, let us hope that they remember a time when a publication like Tempo could be banned overnight, and that the possible repercussions that a victory by either of the two candidates might impose on Indonesia'€™s hard-won speech freedoms figure in prominently in their selection of a candidate.

The writer, a freelance journalist, was a Shansi teaching fellow to Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.