Indonesia’s anti-pornography bill : A Case study of decision making in the Indonesian Parliament (DPR) (original) (raw)
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In late 2008, Indonesia's parliament passed a law against pornography. The debate was short, because the bill had already been thoroughly discussed and revised in committees and a majority of legislators had agreed to support it. Prior to the vote, however, nearly a hundred legislators opposed to the bill stormed out of parliament in protest. The ratification of the legislation Rancangan Undang-Undang Pornografi, or RUU Pornografi as it is commonly known, marks the end of one of the many bitter public controversies that have preoccupied Indonesians since the collapse of the authoritarian Soeharto regime in 1998. At a time when Indonesia is still in the process of political and social flux, the recent debates over issues such as pornography entail competing ideas about how Islam should be incorporated into the nation-state.
This research explores how political linkages between different Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and between CSOs and Parliament are established, formed, and operated, as well as their impact on democracy. The drafting of the Pornography Law, initiated by the Indonesian Council of Ulamas (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) which was deeply concerned by widespread pornographic content, is used here as a case study. This article finds that since the very beginning, CSOs and Parliament were vertically polarized into two blocs based on identity and ideology: the first consisting of Islamic groups and the second consisting of nationalist, non-Muslim, and adat groups. This research finds that identity remains the main machine driving Indonesian politics, jeopardizing the process of democracy. As this research also finds mobilization to be the basis of linkage between different CSOs and between CSOs and parliament, this article argues that participation as a key ingredient of democracy has been sidelined in the whole process.
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The inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine hit the streets of Jakarta in January 2006. At that time, Indonesia’s parliament was debating a controversial antipornography bill. For weeks on end, parliament invited leading intellectuals, public figures, activists, and religious leaders to offer relevant testimony. Whereas human rights activists and women’s groups bemoaned restrictions the bill placed on female bodies, many Muslim leaders lauded the legislation for “enjoining the good and forbidding evil.” In particular, celebrity televangelist K.H. Abdullah Gymnastiar, known across the archipelago as Aa Gym, or “elder brother” Gym, urged parliament to consider the moral hazards of viewing pornography. Aa Gym admonished that, according to an Islamic ethics of vision, to view such images would lead to the moral decay of the heart. He testified before parliament: “Allah commands us to avert our gaze. What Indonesians need is to cultivate a sense of shame that will help them avoi...
The draft legislation on the control of pornography generated more controversy than any other bill in post-Soeharto Indonesia. The bill stirred up feelings about issues that go to the heart of the implicit compact between the various cultural streams in Indonesian society that has underpinned the state since independence. It appeared at a time of rising controversy about apparent efforts to legislate sharia-based norms. This article argues that the bill was passed, not because of a strong commitment to its contents by the majority of the parliament (DPR) but because of problems with the decision-making processes within the DPR and poor communication between DPR members and their political parties. The bill reached an advanced stage of the internal processes of the DPR long before its implications had been properly considered by the members of the relevant DPR committee, or their political parties, and without sufficient public consultations having occurred. Insufficient capacity to scrutinise bills from the perspective of both good policy and good drafting can mean that bills are drafted by outside interests in an ad hoc and unrepresentative manner. So-called 'consensus' decision-making then creates pressures on parties to agree to poor quality bills becoming official documents of the DPR. Had the bill been canvassed amongst a wider range of public opinion at an early stage of drafting and been subjected to more thorough discussion at the committee stage it would probably never have become the subject of such divisive and potentially damaging controversy.
Jurnal Samarah, 2022
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Islam, the State and the Constitutional Court in Indonesia
Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, 2010
Indonesia is home to more Muslims than any other country. Yet it is not an Islamic state and is unlikely to become one, despite the strong and sustained urgings of some Muslim groups. Indonesian Islam is, like Indonesian society itself, dynamic and diverse, accommodating a wide variety of practices and beliefs. One area of contention between conservative Muslims on the one hand, and the state (supported by many more moderate Muslims) on the other, is the extent to which Islamic law should be recognised, applied and enforced by institutions of state. The Indonesian government's response has generally been to limit formal recognition of Islamic law to specified areas of family law and finance, codifying the relevant principles and enforcing them through Islamic courts. This article considers whether the constitutional freedom of religion, introduced in 2000, requires the state to provide mechanisms to apply and enforce the corpus of Islamic law. In particular, it discusses two cases in which Muslims asked the Indonesian Constitutional Court to consider whether freedom of religion required the state to remove restrictions on polygamy, and to allow Indonesia's Religious Courts to apply Islamic law in its entirety, including criminal law.