Indonesia: 'Religious Rights' Bill Would Harm Minorities

The Indonesian government should scrap a draft law on the protection of religious rights that reinforces existing regulations that discriminate against religious minorities, Human Rights Watch said today.

The religious rights protection bill, which is expected to go before parliament by the end of 2017, enshrines both Indonesia's abusive blasphemy law and decrees which restrict religious minorities seeking to construct houses of worship. The draft law also imposes excessively narrow criteria for a religion to receive state recognition, and increases the powers of the discriminatory official Religious Harmony Forums (Forum Kerukunan Umat Beragama or FKUB).

"The misnamed religious rights bill is nothing less than a repackaging of highly toxic regulations against religious minorities in Indonesia," said Andreas Harsono, senior Indonesia researcher. "The Indonesian government should abolish discriminatory regulations, not collect them under a cynical veneer of 'religious protections.'"

The government has sought to justify the law on the basis that "[existing] regulations guaranteeing the protection of religious rights are neither sufficient nor applicable enough to the changing landscape of the society's legal needs." But while religious minorities in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, are vulnerable to discriminatory laws and official indifference to worsening intolerance by militant Islamists, the draft law compounds rather than mitigates those threats.

The draft law reinforces and expands the scope of Indonesia's abusive 1965 blasphemy law. The law, article 156a of the Indonesian criminal code, punishes deviations from the central tenets of the six officially recognized religions with up to five years in prison. The blasphemy law has been used to prosecute and imprison members of religious minorities and traditional religions. Recent targets of the blasphemy law include three former leaders of the Gafatar religious community following the violent forced eviction of more than 7,000 members of the group from their homes on Kalimantan island in 2016, and former Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama. The blasphemy law also has been used as the legal basis for a number of government regulations that facilitate official discrimination on the basis of religion. These include a June 2008 government decree that ordered members of the Ahmadiyah religious community to cease all public religious activities on the grounds they deviated from the principal teachings of Islam, and threatened violators with up to five years in prison.

The draft law expands the current sole criteria for a blasphemy offense of "showing hostility, abuse, or desecration" toward a religion to a total of seven criteria. Article 31 of the draft law states that anyone who persuades others to convert from their original religion faces a maximum prison term of four years. Article 32 allows for six months in prison for anyone convicted of "purposefully creating noises near worship houses when people are conducting their religious ceremonies." Article 34 allows for a five-year prison term for anyone convicted of "illegally tainting, destroying, or burning a holy book, a worship house or ritual tools." The bill provides no definition for what would constitute "tainting" those objects.

The draft law also reinforces existing discriminatory "administrative and technical requirements" that unfairly restrict the construction of houses of worship by religious minorities. Article 14 reiterates the existing official approvals for the construction of a house of worship including "a written recommendation from the Religious Affairs Ministry" and "a letter of recommendation from a particular city/regency's Religious Harmony Forum." Article 13 also hinges official approval for construction permits for houses of worship to "the proportion in which adherents of a particular religion, which wants to set up the house, relative to their village's total population."

These conditions echo the decrees on construction of houses of worship pronounced in 1969 and 2006 that have long infringed upon the right to freedom of religion by unnecessarily restricting the construction of houses of worship. These regulations have especially been used to discriminate against Christians who seek to build churches. In rare cases, they have also been used in Christian-majority eastern Indonesia and Hindu-majority Bali Island against Muslims who seek to build mosques and Christians who want to build churches.