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 could only be filed by the person who had been defamed and the court’s action aimed to ensure legal certainty and prevent “arbitrariness by the law enforcer”.
The President’s spokesperson, Prasetyo Hadi said the government respected and would follow the ruling if it affected policy.
He also reiterated the importance of “responsible freedom of speech” such as addressing critics based on data.
Any ruling by the Constitutional Court is effective immediately and legally binding.
Tangkilisan’s lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis praised the decision, saying even a good government needed 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 the more prominent defamation cases in recent years, two rights activists were charged with defamation under the law in 2023 after being accused of defaming a senior cabinet minister. They were later 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 and Stefanno Sulaiman; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Kate Mayberry)
