Tony Hotland, Jakarta – Plans to soften the capital punishment law and old ordinances on sedition and to replace the one-year jail term with community service are among the most contentious issues in a bill to revise the outdated Criminal Code.
The government said Thursday it was planning another round of discussions with experts to complete the draft code before presenting it to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for his approval.
The bill was discussed Thursday in a Cabinet meeting led by Yudhoyono and is scheduled to be submitted to the House of Representatives in July for deliberation.
In the bill, the government offers several new approaches to enforcing the law. These accommodate punishments for crimes specified in the many international conventions Indonesia has ratified since the existing Criminal Code was first enforced in 1918.
Justice and Human Rights Minister Hamid Awaluddin said the bill, which has taken around 25 years to complete, touched on new issues not contained in the existing law, such as contempt of court, torture, domestic violence, money laundering, blasphemy, war crimes, pornography, gross human rights violations, corporate crime, cyber crime and human trafficking.
"In the draft law, we have decided to abolish the one-year jail term and replace it with an alternative sentence in the form of imposing a fine and community service," he said.
The minister said 20 percent of the total inmates in prisons nationwide were serving one year or less in prison, overcrowding jails.
The government has listened to arguments that said the one-year jail term did nothing to rehabilitate small-time criminals but ended up making them worse offenders after release. It favors a supervised community service program along with increased fines, as alternatives.
National Resilience Institute governor Muladi, a legal expert who heads the bill's drafting team, said the issue of whether to terminate capital punishment was heavily debated in the Cabinet meeting.
"There are many concerns, and pros and cons, particularly if seen from the angles of religion and culture. So we have decided to keep the article on capital punishment, but we also put in articles on how the sentence could be reduced to life imprisonment," he said.
Muladi said death sentences would only be commuted in specific circumstances. Factors considered would include the level of involvement of suspects in crimes and the remorse and guilt they showed after capture.
The government would also narrow the scope of old laws on sedition used by previous governments stifle freedom of expression.
"For this, we have narrowed the definition of the crimes of inciting hatred and causing insult (to the government) to acts that cause public disorder. We hope this will not be interpreted to mean people can be easily charged for taking part in protests against the government," Muladi said.
On issues of public decency and pornography, he said the bill contained "few limitations" to ensure the state did not interfere in the personal lives of citizens. "We have limited the issue of adultery. This, once again, may cause lengthy debate since we have had to take into account the perspectives of public privacy, religion and lifestyle," Muladi said.
The bill contained 741 articles and its deliberations would be expected to take two years, he said.