With an election in just 13 months, the Indonesian government is more worried about winning votes than about international push back to its controversial new legislation.
Then, just three weeks after a successful G20 Summit in Bali, the country was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons when its parliament– along with insulting the president, new interpretations of the ancient sin of blasphemy, and other curbs on free speech.
The current President, Joko Widodo – usually known as Jokowi – is constitutionally barred from a third term. This makes the next presidential election the most consequential race since he came to power in 2014. But this time Jokowi’s priorities lie elsewhere. Rather than starting new fights, Jokowi wants to wrap things up. His focus is on advancing his pet projects, led by Indonesia’s new capital city on the island of Borneo.
Jokowi wants the new capital to be his legacy: A computer-generated image of the new presidential palace.Many Indonesians welcome the new code. They want to have legal recourse if their spouse is having an affair. So there is the link between the new criminal code and support for those in parliament who finally got it done.
Major reforms have taken place, including the relaxing of some labour protection rules and the removal of the notorious negative investment list that cut foreigners off from whole sectors of the economy. The creation of the INA has attracted pension funds from all over the world. The Albanese government
In addition to criminalising sex outside of marriage, if the relevant clause is not upset by a legal challenge, in three years it appears same-sex couples living together could also be at risk from prosecution. Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama was soundly defeated in the April 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election and later jailed for two years after he was charged with blasphemy.He cites the example of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, better known as Ahok, the Christian politician who was jailed for the crime of blasphemy in 2017.
It is true, as the Jokowi government pointed out, that some changes to criminal punishment in the new code are positive. It will be possible to commute death sentences if prisoners can demonstrate they have reformed. If that had been on the books in 2015, the Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran who were executed following conviction for drug smuggling, could still be alive.
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