Jakarta – The House of Representatives should stop drafting the state secrecy bill because it will limit public access to important information and legitimize abuses of power, a coalition of human rights groups says.

The groups, including the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI), human rights watch group Imparsial and the Vision for the Nation's Children Foundation, lodged their protest against the draft legislation Wednesday.

If the bill was passed it would protect authorities that were abusing their power, YLBHI's Munarman said. "There are many articles in the bill that are not clear and could be interpreted in many ways," Munarman said.

The central problem was that Article 5 of the bill did not provide a clear definition of what state secrets were, he said.

"It says state secrets include defense and security matters, international relations, law enforcement, affairs of national economic importance, state coding systems, state intelligence systems and vital national assets.

"In this context, almost anything could be a state secret without clearer wording." Neither did the law specify one single institution authorized to determine state secrets or the procedures for this purpose.

"It would mean that every institution had the authority to determine state secrets without any clear standards." Munarman said the bill could also be used to protect graft suspects and human rights abusers.

"Since there is no standard (to define a secret), perpetrators could say the evidence or information that could put them in prison is a state secret." He said the country's legal system was based on principles of transparency. "Judges, when they begin trials, always say the trial is open to the public. Evidence and information presented in trials must be accessible by everybody," he said.

Munarman said while the country did need a law to protect state secrets, "we already have articles on this matter in the bill on freedom of information." Al Araf of Imparsial said the law could be used against witnesses testifying in important cases. "Witnesses would be afraid to tell the truth because they could be held culpable for leaking state secrets," he said.

He said that under Article 28 of the bill, the state secrets board – the body which determines government policy on classified information – was given the authority to block legal investigations.

"This is bad for our legal system because the board could protect public officials who are on trial," Al Araf said. He said there was no place for this bill in an era of increasing democracy and transparency.

Responding to the criticism of the bill, Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said the debate was natural in a democracy. In developed countries like the United States and Britain there were frequent disputes about what information should be kept state secrets and what should be revealed in the public interest, he said.