ABSTRACT

My primary aim in this chapter is to identify and analyse the legal defences submitted by Ahok’s lawyers in their final plea: their Notice of Defence (Nota Pembelaan). The Notice of Defence is a 634-page document comprising seven chapters. As I note in Chapter 4, it was issued in court, both orally and in writing, on 25 April 2017, the penultimate trial session before the court issued its judgment convicting Ahok of blasphemy on 9 May 2017. In many ways, it is a detailed articulation of a liberal democratic construction of Indonesian human rights law, albeit one that was ultimately rejected by the North Jakarta State Court.

The extent to which the defence’s legal arguments were acknowledged – or, more accurately, ignored – by the North Jakarta State Court forms a significant and timely point of inquiry regarding the central questions of this book. Two significant issues emerge from the discussion in this chapter. The first is the extent to which Ahok’s legal team relied on constitutional and statutory human rights as legal defences, and the fact that they were all ignored by the court. The second is the extent to which the defence at the same time both indulged and queried the authority of the MUI Central Religious Opinion and Stance, as if it were a source of positive law, which it is plainly not. As I note, this notwithstanding, an MUI edict frustrates the legal process, at least to the extent that it is typically seen by the courts as ‘political insurance’ for a decision to convict.