Tb. Arie Rukmantara, Jakarta – The government, the House of Representatives and the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission agreed Friday to end their dispute over the four controversial government regulations on broadcasting, saying they will team up to revise the laws.
The agreement was reached in talks mediated by the Constitutional Court, which advised the three disputing parties to find an out-of-court settlement, commission member Sasa Djuarsa Sendjaja told The Jakarta Post.
"(The commission) will drop its plan for legal action to review the regulations and has decided to allow a team of five people to work together with the government to revise the regulations within a month," he said.
Lawmakers, commission members and other broadcasting organizations have criticized the four regulations – No. 49/2005 on foreign broadcasters, No. 50/2005 on private broadcasters, No. 51/2005 on community broadcasters and No. 52/2005 on foreign broadcasters – which they said violated the 2002 Broadcasting Law.
They argued that the regulations authorizing the government to license broadcasters and banning local media from directly relaying news programs provided by foreign networks would curb media freedoms in the country.
The regulations also provide frameworks to allocate broadcast frequencies, monitor programs, sanction errant broadcasters and put limits on foreign ownership of local media.
Sasa said the revisions to the regulations would hopefully benefit all parties. "We would like to encourage local TV and radio stations to grow and allow people to get information from abroad. The regulations should be revised to fulfill these needs," he said.
Legislator Dedi Jamaludin Malik said although the agreement was informal in nature, it was a step forward to designing better regulations for the country's broadcasting industry.
"We believe that the (current) regulations infringe on the authority of other institutions and therefore we want the government to postpone the implementation of the regulations until the revisions are made," he said.
"The revisions should place the government and the KPI on the proper (equal) footing as mandated by the broadcasting law," Dedi said.