torture is still a part of law enforcement in Indonesia

INDONESIAN suspects and convicts are routinely tortured by police and prison wardens to obtain confessions or information, a report claims.

Beatings, intimidation, burnings and rape were so commonplace that they were considered the norm, with few victims bothering to lodge complaints, Restaria Hutabarat of the Jakarta-based Legal Aid Foundation said yesterday.

The findings are based on year-long interviews with 1154 suspects and prison inmates in the capital and four other major cities in 2009-10.

Questionnaires were also given to 419 police, prosecutors, judges, wardens and rights activists who accompanied suspects during the legal process.

"We found that torture is systematic," Mr Hutabarat said, adding that it started with the arrest and continued during interrogations, trials and after imprisonment.

"It is seen as a normal way to get information and extract confessions, " he said.

Indonesia, a nation of 237 million people, only emerged from decades of dictatorship in 1998. Though it has moved towards democracy by scrapping repressive laws, freeing the media and letting citizens pick their leaders, a weak legal system remains.

National police spokesman Colonel Boy Rafli Amar said he would study the 21-page report. "If officers are abusing civilians, they should face sanctions," he said. "It's unacceptable. "

Under Indonesian law, torture carried out by law enforcers is not considered a crime. And evidence thus obtained is accepted in court.

"I was kicked and beaten, even stripped and groped," said convicted drug user Suliyanti, who spent five years in prison on drug charges and agreed with the findings. "I know many other female suspects and convicts who were also raped."

Comments

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog