Markus Junianto Sihaloho, Jakarta – A media watchdog has urged the House of Representatives to repeal a law giving the government absolute power to ban certain books, saying it curtails freedom of expression.

PR2Media raised this with House Commission I, which oversees communications and information affairs, on Monday.

PR2Media coordinator Amir Effendi Siregar said it was ironic that Indonesia was lauded as a democratic country by the international community when it still has a law banning books.

Amir said press freedom was already recognized by the Indonesian government, hence the freedom of book distribution must also be acknowledged. "The government must annul the law on book banning," he said. "The House must help us deliver this demand to the government."

The group also gave the legislators a book on the history of book-banning in Indonesia.

He added that PR2Media, along with other nongovernmental groups, would seek a judicial review with the Constitutional Court to annul the law. "Under this law, hundreds of books have been banned and thousands have been burned. This must be stopped," he said.

The law in question, on "securing printed materials," was passed in 1963 and used under the regime of former President Suharto to clamp down on dissent.

More recently, it has been used by the Attorney General's Office to ban 22 books, most of them dealing with the alleged communist coup attempt of 1965, in the past six years. The AGO's latest blacklist included a book on the 1965 pogrom of suspected communists, the insurgency in Papua, and two books on religion.

PR2Media researcher Iwan Awaluddin said authors should be allowed to defend their works from being banned through the legal process. "If the government decides to retain its authority to ban books, then it should allow authors to mount a legal challenge through the court," he said.

He added books are important in letting people now the truth about a variety of issues. By granting freedom only to the press, he went on, the government had failed to ensure that the people had access to the truth.

He cited a US study which showed that most news media outlets tend to be less than objective in their news coverage. "We need to have freedom to distribute books because the press could potentially air fake reports," he said.