Liberal democracy and human rights in Indonesia

In this chapter I discuss the development of liberal democratic human rights law in Indonesia. As the basis of the liberal democratic narrative to which I refer in Chapter 1, I commence by tracing the origins of liberal democracy and human rights in Indonesia. I then examine the enactment of Indonesia’s national human rights statute, Law No. 39 of 1999 on Basic Human Rights, and the incorporation of Chapter XA on Basic Human Rights into the 1945 Constitution. As part of this process, I acknowledge the key figures and conditions that enabled such rapid reform, notwithstanding Indonesia’s history of authoritarian rule under President Soekarno (1945–1967) and President Soeharto (1967–1998).

The chapter culminates with an examination of the Constitutional Court’s landmark material review of Indonesia’s Blasphemy Law. As I note in Chapter 1, I use Alfred Stepan’s democratic theory of the ‘twin tolerations’ to argue that the court’s ruling fundamentally repudiated the liberal democracy envisaged by Chapter XA of the 1945 Constitution. I also argue that the court’s ruling is an articulation of what I refer to as an Islamist majoritarian construction of human rights law, directly informed by the Islamist majoritarian narrative that the prioritisation of the protection of the religious sensibilities of Indonesia’s Sunni Muslim majority over the fundamental rights of religious minorities is necessary in order to maintain public order in contemporary Indonesia. I conclude that the court’s decision to endorse religious orthodoxy, as defined by Indonesia’s religious parent organisations (organisasi keagamaan induk) and religious scholars (ulama), as a reason to derogate from otherwise non-derogable human rights guarantees, constitutes a major challenge to the rule of law in Indonesia and the country’s nascent democracy.