It has been more than a decade since Indonesia bid farewell to Soeharto's authoritarian regime and dove into the pool of democracy.
Like a juvenile who has earned a new freedom, the country – be it elite politicians or ordinary citizens – has been muddling through the air of freedom, longing for its own version of democracy.
Led by no less than four presidents, the government, the former common foe under the previous regime, has played the role of insightful trader, carefully choosing rights that could be awarded to citizens.
After installing direct elections in 2004, both at the presidential and local levels, the government also established other bodies to ensure that citizens could plea and defend their rights in the eyes of justice.
The Constitutional Court was established in 2003 to open the way for citizens who demanded re-interpretation of laws and the Constitution to fulfill their constitutional rights. Those who wanted to challenge lower level regulations, such as bylaws and decrees, could now go to the Supreme Court.
As with many other textbook style utopias, what lies bare beneath the sun is not always as good as what has been written in the text. And in a country where the majority are Muslims, the state has maintained tight measures on its methods to control morality.
The regional autonomy experience has spawned 182 bylaws that have restricted women's rights, 28 of which were deliberated this year. "It's even harder to exercise those bylaws through judicial review in the Supreme Court," National Commission on Violence Against Women commissioner Neng Dara Affiah told The Jakarta Post recently, saying that once bylaws were enacted they were hard to revoke.
Some bylaws oblige Muslim women to be veiled, while others prohibit women from leaving their houses after dark without being accompanied by their lawful spouse or a male relative.
This year also saw the Constitutional Court rebuff a judicial review against the controversial 2008 Pornography Law. Defying the requests of women activists, rights groups and coalitions, the judges upheld the law's definition of porn as "forms of messages through various communication mediums and/or public displays, which contain obscenity or sexual exploitation that violates community norms".
The only woman on the panel, Judge Maria Farida Indrati, raised her dissenting opinion calling the porn definition ambiguous, but failed to turn the tables.
Singer Nazriel "Ariel" Ilham fell as its first culprit after sex videos allegedly featuring him and two models – apparently his long-time girlfriend TV host Luna Maya and presenter Cut Tari on separate occasions – circulated on the Internet.
Another controversial law, the Blasphemy Law, had also been challenged by some human rights, democracy and pluralism groups – even the late former president Abdurrahman Wahid. They lost the battle on April 19 when the Court dismissed their appeals.
A glimmer of light in favor of education and information was provided by the Constitutional Court, which stripped the government's right to ban books under the 1963 Law on Confiscation of Printed Materials.
The Court in October announced that granting government officials the authority to ban books without due process of law was against the Constitution and violated citizens' basic rights.
Its ruling stripped the Attorney General's Office of its authority to ban the publication of books, but turned out an appeal to expunge its power to monitor book publications.
On another judicial review case in April, the public succeeded in exercising their rights when the Court annulled the controversial 2009 Law on Educational Legal Entities, which mandates that all higher education institutions have to be private legal entities.
The Court cited that such a mechanism would hamper the educational process because there was "an obvious disparity in the capacity of the state universities in the country". (ipa)