ICC Note

After the conviction and imprisonment of Jakarta Governor, Tjahaja Purnama, UN experts are urging Indonesian officials to drop the charges. This conviction puts Indonesia at risk at becoming a country largely governed by moderate Muslims, as it was trying to quell the radical groups under Purnama’s governing. The UN experts say the government in Jakarta should have stood up to those pressures of unlawfully imprisoning Purnama.

2017-05-23 Indonesia (Reuters) U.N. experts urged Indonesia on Monday to free Jakarta’s Christian governor, who was jailed this month for blasphemy – a conviction that risks encouraging Islamists to challenge secularism in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.

Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an ethnic Chinese popularly known as “Ahok”, was jailed on May 9 for a longer-than-expected two years under a fatwa from Indonesia’s highest Muslim clerical council and after aggressive media campaigns and violent protests.

The government should have stood up to those pressures, the three U.N. experts said.

Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo was an ally of Purnama and the verdict will be a setback for his government as it seeks to quell radical groups and soothe investors’ concerns that the country’s secular values were at risk.

“Instead of speaking out against hate speech by the leaders of the protests, the Indonesian authorities appear to have appeased incitement to religious intolerance and discrimination,” the U.N. experts said in a statement.

Letting the verdict stand would undermine freedom of religion in Indonesia, they said.

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