13 January 2025
Godly Constitution and Divine Enlightenment
God is not dead, at least not in Indonesia. Belief in God is not only fervent across the population, but also exalted as part of the constitutional identity of the state itself. On 3 January 2025, the Indonesian Constitutional Court issued a judgment concerning the rights of non-believers in Indonesia. The Court essentially ruled that there is ‘no room’ for the freedom to be irreligious in Indonesia. Most notably, the Court has declared that the 1945 Indonesian Constitution is a ‘Godly Constitution’, and therefore all laws must always be ‘illuminated by divine enlightenment’. The judgment represents an unusual form of constitutional theocracy, which is inherently syncretic and claims to represent the collective wisdom of all recognised religions of Indonesia. Continue reading >>
0 
07 November 2024
Is This a Constitutional Democracy
Indonesia, a country that has experimented with constitutional democracy since 1998, inaugurated its new president, Prabowo Subianto, on October 20, 2024. His so-called “Red and White Cabinet” may appear peculiar from the perspective of Western democracies due to its concentration of power. Prabowo assembled a “bloated cabinet” of 48 ministers constituting a hodge-podge of anti-Sharia pluralists, nationalists, Islamists, and others, all swearing fealty to the magico-religious Pancasila. We argue that Prabowo’s cabinet parallels the “family state”, which envisions the state as a large Indonesian family working together to maintain familial harmony. Continue reading >>
0
21 December 2023
Constitutional Identity vs. Human Rights
In two recent Latvian cases concerning the Russian-speaking minority decided respectively in September and November 2023, the ECtHR made clear that protection of constitutional identity has now been elevated to a legitimate aim for a differential treatment under the Convention. This post explores how the protection of constitutional identity has been deployed to enable a collective punishment by association with a former occupier, and how the ECtHR’s reasoning has effectively endorsed such a punishment, which is unbefitting of a liberal democratic system the ECHR aspires to represent. Until the three cases were decided, no liberal European democracy could argue without losing face that suppressing a large proportion of its population was its constitutional identity – one of the goals of its statehood. Today, this claim is seemingly kosher, marking a U-turn in the understanding of what the European human rights protection system is for minorities in Europe. Continue reading >>
0
07 December 2022
‘Inherently Repugnant’?
Indonesia has recently gained the international spotlight for criminalising sex outside marriage in its new Criminal Code. Criminalisation of sex outside marriage and cohabitation constitutes a setback for the right to privacy, which covers consensual sexual activity between adults in private. Nevertheless, the bigger picture is much more nuanced. Continue reading >>
0