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Indonesia creates more than 40 new crimes per year since 1998
Jakarta Post - September 23, 2016
The study, presented by UI law researcher Anugerah Rizki Akbari during a hearing on the legality of extramarital sex at the Constitutional Court on Thursday, has found that between 1998 and 2014, lawmakers and the government enacted 154 new crime laws.
Two-thirds of them punished actions or behaviors that were not previously considered crimes. "The number of the new crimes [within that period] were 716. So imagine that, we created 716 new punishable crimes just in the span of 16 years. That's more than 40 new crimes per year," Anugrah told The Jakarta Post after the hearing.
He said it was too easy for otherwise law-abiding citizens to run afoul of the overwhelming number of criminal laws in the country.
Anugerah said Indonesia looked to the criminal justice system to resolve far too many wrongs, grievances and disputes. "But not every harmful or unjust act should be labelled a crime warranting a criminal conviction and incarceration," he said.
The country is now facing over-criminalization, defined as an act of imposing unbalanced penalties with no relation to the gravity of the offense committed or the culpability of the wrong doer. It is also understood as the imposition of excessive punishment or sentences without adequate justification.
Anugerah cited an example of someone who was criminalized for charging his phone using the electrical socket of a shopping mall. "They [prosecutors] thought the action could be criminalized under the Law on Electricity," he said.
The Electronic Information and Transaction (ITE) law is another example of legislation that over-criminalizes harmless activities, such as commenting on a friend's status update on Facebook or Twitter.
Since its passing in 2008, the ITE Law, which mandates criminal punishment for anyone who purposely and without authority distributes electronic information or documents with libelous or defamatory content, has sent at least 200 people to jail for expressing their opinions on the web.
Law enforcers and legislators should treat the criminal justice system as a last resort, the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) said.
"Criminalizing an act is the last resort. It should only be taken if other previous steps were insufficient," Komnas HAM commissioner Roichatul Aswidah told the court.
She advised the court to be careful in deciding whether extramarital sex between unmarried and same-sex couples was a crime as it could criminalize the people's rights. "An intervention into private lives might be justified, but only when other people's rights are being violated," she said.
Anugerah said there were many ways to resolve injustices and hold people accountable – even punish them – without needing to turn to the criminal justice system. "We are a nation that likes to punish people."
The study had found that the country's flawed criminal justice system granted extraordinary discretion to prosecutors, which had led to costly mass incarcerations that were often overly punitive, he further said.
"It will lead to greater injustice. That's what's happening in Indonesia. We can no longer differentiate what's right and what's wrong," Anugerah said.
Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/09/23/indonesia-creates-more-40-new-crimes-year-1998.html.
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