BLASPHEMY IN COMPARATIVE CONTEXT

In a global comparative study by Freedom House, blasphemy laws are found to be imprecise, leaving “enormous discretion in the hands of prosecutors, judges, and accusers who may be influenced by political or personal priorities,” which is borne out by the evidence in Indonesia (Freedom House 2010, 3). A comparison of Algeria, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Poland shows blasphemy laws to be “vaguely worded and ill-defined,” rendering the laws prone to arbitrary application, a situation that “typically give rise to the violation, not the protection, of fundamental human rights” (Freedom House 2010, 1–2). The Pew Research Center (Theodorou Reference Theodorou2016) and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (Fiss and Kestenbaum Reference Fiss and Kestenbaum2017) find blasphemy laws in 71 of the world's countries and territories. Blasphemy laws are often vague and difficult to code for analytical purposes, but the general finding is that they deviate from international legal standards on human rights and free expression.Footnote ³ Iran and Pakistan have the most severe prohibitions on blasphemy that result in discrimination and abuses of power (Fiss and Kestenbaum Reference Fiss and Kestenbaum2017, 19), with cases such as the 2011 assassination of former Punjab governor Salman Taseer igniting intense political debate.

The political revival of blasphemy in Indonesia coincides with the country's democratic transition after the resignation of President Suharto in May 1998. Blasphemy prosecutions may seem perplexing given that democratic transitions are generally expected to improve civil rights and standards of justice. As Peterson (Reference Peterson2018) finds, an active and illiberal blasphemy law is often used to stifle public criticism of religion in Indonesia. The complex nature of blasphemy means that those who feel judicial processes are tarnished, or punishments are unfair, cannot publicly deny the existence of the crime of blasphemy.

Charges of blasphemy and defamation are similar in that they are complex discursive crimes; immaterial, subjective, and potentially boundless (Streckfuss Reference Streckfuss2011, 21). According to Joss Marsh (Reference Marsh1998, 7), “blasphemy marks the moving boundary line between the permissible and the prohibited,” raising the problematic question of who serves as the final legal or moral arbiter in such cases. The risk with laws preventing religious offence is that they have “no rational boundaries” and therefore “threaten creeping repression” (Jones Reference Jones1980, 139). With these concerns in mind, a landmark attempt by Indonesian legal and human rights activists to repeal the blasphemy law (Law 1/PNPS/1965 concerning the prevention of religious abuse, issued by presidential decree) was rejected by the Constitutional Court in 2010 on populist majoritarian grounds of national unity and religious harmony. This contentious decision seems to legitimize Indonesia's blasphemy regime and enables cases such as the 2017 conviction of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, who now wishes to be called BTP rather than his Hakka Chinese alias Ahok.

Blasphemy, which in Indonesia usually refers to divergence from and offence against Islam (Butt Reference Butt2018, 407), can serve as a pretext for punishments, convictions, and political reprisals premised on the need to preserve public order. Blasphemy seems anachronistic, and yet the laws passed in its name remain powerful tools for intervention into public affairs, challenging democratic principles such as the right to free expression, tolerance, and diversity. The “conservative turn” in Indonesian Islam since democratization (van Bruinessen Reference Van Bruinessen and van Bruinessen2013) partially explains the political and judicial influence of groups such as the Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (MUI) that publicly endorse blasphemy trials, issue conservative religious opinions (fatwa), and claim to legitimately represent the general Muslim public. Osman and Waikar (Reference Osman and Waikar2018) see the Purnama case as an indicator of the rise of far-right “uncivil” Islamist groups playing on majoritarian insecurities about the ethnic Chinese and ungodly leftist ideologies.

As with the Muslim majority in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand account for at least 90% of the population, and yet they seem to be trapped in a state of collective anxiety about the future (McCargo Reference McCargo2012, 1). The legitimacy of the Thai state rests on national myths about identity and territory that converge as a form of “Thainess,” and Thai Buddhists in such a highly charged political environment are prone to intolerance toward Muslim and Christian minorities (McCargo Reference McCargo2012, 18). The perceived threat of minority domination (by Chinese Christians in Indonesia, Malay Muslims in Thailand) seems to be spreading, which partially explains the prevalence of discursive crimes such as blasphemy in ethnically divided countries. In this context, religious incitement leading to prosecutions are often caused by political agents seeking to profit by persuasion, deploying powerful “injustice frames” that highlight intolerable offences such as blasphemy (George Reference George2016, 11). The fact that some people will inevitably, and often deliberately, find offense in processes of free inquiry that may include ridicule seems insufficient reason to limit public debates on religion. And yet blasphemy, which has gradually shifted from protecting to policing belief, challenges the fundamental right to free thought and expression, and creates risks in diverse nations such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Thailand.

Commenting on the persistence of blasphemy laws throughout the world, David Lawton (Reference Lawton1993, 10) suggests that “the relation between blasphemy and sedition is one structural reason why the law is slow to give up the offence of blasphemy.” David Nash (Reference Nash2007, 10) finds that the history of blasphemy follows a series of chronological shifts, from “conceptions of the damaged community of believers, to the damaged social and political peace, arriving finally at the wounded feelings and convictions of modern individuals.” Peter Jones (Reference Jones1980, 131) suggests that the legal rationale for blasphemy has developed in a similar way, beginning with efforts to criminalize contemptuous utterances concerning the Deity. This evolved into a campaign to give legal protection to the doctrines and institutions of the established faith, followed by the need to protect the state against sedition. The next iteration was to protect the fabric of society and public morality against threats to public order, and then to protect individuals from that which offends their religious sensibilities. We now seem to have entered an era of “hate spin,” where religious incitement or “manufactured indignation” is used as a political strategy that “exploits group identity to mobilize supporters and coerce opponents” (George Reference George2016, 4). One of the most prolific hate spin agents in Indonesia is the hardline Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI), whose members specifically targeted Purnama because of his minority status and his attempt to ban the FPI during his tenure as governor of Jakarta (Telle Reference Telle2018a).

David Lawton (Reference Lawton1993, 3) contends that “blasphemy stands for whatever society most abhors and has the power to prosecute,” although it seems blasphemy is more of a reflection of what the powerful, speaking on behalf of society, abhor, and fear. Some conservative Islamist organizations in Indonesia seek to gain political influence through street demonstrations, legal actions as well as social media campaigns to defend religion while also manufacturing outrage, thus increasing the potential for the criminalization of blasphemy. The appropriation of blasphemy to serve as an instrument of discipline and social control marks the end of blasphemy as a literal crime against God or scripture. The repurposing of religious offence by state and non-state organizations to impose order and punish transgression should invoke Henry Lea's (Reference Lea1906, 6) warning about the “spiritual despotism” of those in power during the Spanish Inquisition.

Indonesia is said to follow Dutch and Swiss models of religious freedom that emphasize multi-religious accommodation and formal state recognition, as opposed to American and French separations of church and state (Hefner Reference Hefner2016, 61). Where there is a strong libertarian tradition, such as in the United States, it generally transpires that individual expression can only be “prevented and punished when there is a strict causal connection between speech and subsequent action or harm” (Post Reference Post1988, 322). For such restrictions to be imposed there must be a causal strictness that maximizes the amount of constitutionally protected free speech (Post Reference Post1988, 322). The First Amendment guarantees the highest threshold of free speech in the world, and the Brandenburg test is used to determine whether speech is directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action or violence (Calvert Reference Calvert2019).Footnote ⁴ Pertinent to religious harmony and offence, the basic rationale for U.S. First Amendment constitutional safeguards is that “line drawing between offensive and non-offensive speech is too complex and subjective to provide rational distinctions” (Calvert and Richards Reference Calvert and Richards2002, 679). One can tentatively conclude, therefore, that “it is not for the government to dictate rules of civility and social mores of speech interactions through laws that tell citizens what they can and cannot say” (Calvert and Richards Reference Calvert and Richards2002, 679).

The necessity of religion to social stability and public morality, as claimed by the Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars and others, is deeply ambiguous. Taking a comparative look at the United Kingdom, in early the post-war period Lord Denning (Reference Denning1949, 46) sought to put an end to medieval debates about blasphemy and public order by proclaiming the offence “a dead letter.” An attempt by Lord Willis to enact a bill in 1979 abolishing blasphemy caused some members of UK House of Lords to claim that blasphemy protects “deeply rooted values in society,” without which society is eroded, nebulous and without purpose, where “just anything goes” (Jones Reference Jones1980, 132). Just anything goes is reminiscent of the dilemma raised in Guy Thorne's Reference Thorne1903 bestselling novel When It Was Dark. Thorne advanced the idea that the world's moral order depends on the divine revelation of Christianity (Kilcrease Reference Kilcrease2014). The basic plot of the book is that, on hearing the news that Christ did not rise from the dead (the resurrection was a hoax), people suddenly found themselves in world without belief, a world with no moral order, and wars, genocide and riots spontaneously broke out on a global scale. This scale of spontaneous moral degeneration (“just anything goes”) is clearly exaggerated, although there is a case to be made that in the absence of religion one's sense of community is diminished.

A contemporary argument by Cherian George (Reference George2016, 18) is “the myth of spontaneous rage,” which focuses on the role of political agents and entrepreneurs seeking to incite violence or mobilize masses, and the ways in which these agents profit when jurists, police and the media treat them as genuine spokespersons of their communities. It follows that blasphemy will remain a coercive tool, working alongside other forms of censure and control, so long as churches, mosques, and synagogues have worshippers and liturgical responsibilities that can be exploited. There are related concerns that debates about offence and public order are not conducted in a robust and neutral “marketplace of ideas,” as some jurists suggest, but rather in a market that is skewed in favor of an entrenched power structure and ideology (Ingber Reference Ingber1984, 85). The concept of blasphemy regimes introduced below helps explain the particular nature of a country's entrenched power structure and ideology.

JUDICIAL LEGITIMACY UNDER BLASPHEMY REGIMES

Religion has been a key unifying factor in Indonesia's post-colonial development, for instance taking the form of “godly nationalism” (an imagined community of believers) in the 1940s (Menchik Reference Menchik2014, 594). By this reading, the archetypal good Indonesian citizen is one who believes in God and behaves in accordance with religious beliefs and values. Liberal ideals have never been a dominant force in Indonesian politics and statecraft. When President Suharto was in power (1966–1998), the “smiling face” of Indonesian Islam was dominated by modernist discourses that worked in tandem with the authoritarian developmental state (van Bruinessen Reference Van Bruinessen and van Bruinessen2013, 1). In the early New Order period under Suharto religion was used as a counterforce against communism and leftist ideology, while strengthening the president's political position through co-optation and vote mobilization (Picard Reference Picard, Michel and Madinier2011, 14). With atheism banned, all citizens were (and continue to be) obliged to follow a state-sanctioned religion. The Ministry of Religious Affairs and Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (MUI) were enlisted to shore up Muslim majority support for Suharto by balancing other core factions such as the armed forces. Since democratization in 1998 the state has become increasingly involved “in the firm demarcation of religious orthodoxy,” leading to truncated religious pluralism and the hardening of political stances on religious deviance in Indonesia (Menchik Reference Menchik2014, 594).

In Muslim majority Indonesia there is no single, absolute religious authority or arbiter, though allegations of blasphemy are often brought to court by the MUI. As virtually the sole expert witness in cases of blasphemy in relation to Islam, police, prosecutors, and judges tend to defer to the MUI, which was first established during the Suharto regime to provide religious-based support for its authoritarian policies. The subsequent post-1998 strengthening of the MUI as a quasi-official body, particularly under the administration of President Yudhoyono (2004–2014), enables the MUI to claim special authority to deal with blasphemy cases and define orthodoxy (Olle Reference Olle, van Klinken and Barker2009, 106). The increasing prominence of the MUI in elections under the current Joko Widodo administration indicates the co-option of blasphemy by political actors with utilitarian views of religion.

Stewart Fenwick (Reference Fenwick2017, 73) identifies the existence of a blasphemy regime in Indonesia, which refers to a regime under which religious offence is redirected toward the protection of institutions and the state, rather than the protection of religious communities per se. To evaluate Fenwick's (Reference Fenwick2017) claims about a blasphemy regime that serves to buttress the Indonesian state, appease religious factions within the country, and limit the scope for public discourse by silencing religious critique, this paper makes comparative reference to the “defamation regime” in Thailand. According to David Streckfuss (Reference Streckfuss2011, 24), a defamation regime has the following features: frequent use of defamation-based laws by the state; little reluctance on the part of police to charge, prosecutors to try, and courts to accept defamation-based cases; little restraint on the part of citizens in accusing others of defamation-based offenses; little or no exemption from guilt allowed by courts; and weak constitutional provisions ensuring freedom of speech. Each of these features is prevalent in Indonesia, raising questions about judicial integrity and the application of the law when blasphemy charges are brought to trial.

THE 2009–2010 CONSTITUTIONAL COURT JUDICIAL REVIEW

In 2009 the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute (LBH), along with prominent legal and human rights organizations in Indonesia such as Imparsial, ELSAM, and the Setara Institute, initiated a judicial review of Law 1/PNPS/1965 and Criminal Code Article 156a. The legal applicants argued that blasphemy provisions contravene the constitutional right to religious freedom in Indonesia (Crouch Reference Crouch2012, 1). In a 2011 Amicus published by human rights experts from Cairo and London, Law 1/PNPS/1965 concerning the prevention of religious abuse is determined to be “fundamentally incompatible with Indonesia's obligations under international human rights law” (Amicus 2011, 3).Footnote ⁶ Article 156a, along with all other criminal code provisions preventing the abuse of religion, should be repealed because they violate freedom of expression, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and equality before the law (Amicus 2011, 4).

Since its establishment in 2003 the Constitutional Court of Indonesia has been an activist court, seeking to strengthen democracy by improving oversight and conducting judicial review in a highly public forum, although the Court faces hostility from politicians and has been forced to make strategic adjustments to “soften the impact of its decisions” (Butt Reference Butt and Dressel2012, 108). The Court's contentious decision to retain Article 156a helps legitimize Indonesia's blasphemy regime at the expense of fair and impartial law enforcement. The 2010 decision reveals an “overarching sense of obligation to respect religion” as well as signs of “weakness” (Fenwick Reference Fenwick2017, 185) in public and judicial reasoning in Indonesia. The Constitutional Court heard questions about freedom of religion and the competency of the state, and some witnesses shared the Amici's position that, with very few exceptions (incitement being the most prominent), it is not for the government to tell their citizens what they can or cannot say, think or believe. Since 2010 the charge of blasphemy has been reviewed a number of times by the Constitutional Court, most recently in 2018 when the Court rejected a petition by members of the Ahmadiyyah community to abolish Article 156a.

Franz Magnis Suseno, a well-known Jesuit priest and professor of philosophy at STF Driyarkara, contends that difference of belief is not blasphemy, that religious deviance is relative, a matter of opinion not fact, that rests outside of the competence of the court and state authorities (Constitutional Court of Indonesia 2010, 253). In a warning against the repressive nature of blasphemy laws, Suseno argues that fringe groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses (and for that matter the Ahmadiyya sect) have the right to believe whatever they wish to believe regardless of the offence caused to Catholic or Sunni majorities, or any nominal idea of majoritarian consensus. As Kari Telle (Reference Telle2018b, 371) points out, the unanswered (and probably unanswerable) theological question about the “true” form of Islam has divided Muslims throughout Islamic history, but in Indonesia today the civil courts “are increasingly adjudicating such theological disputes.” Given these legal trends, it is worth recalling Henry Lea's (Reference Lea1906, 6) historical conception of “spiritual despotism” that arises when the power of religion is misused for political purposes, or turned into an instrument of oppression. According to the Brandenburg test in the United States, courts do not have the competence to adjudicate on matters of religious truth or deviance, which means that jurists should not attempt to draw the lines that separate blasphemy from inquiry, ridicule, or doubt.

Contrary to Franz Magnis Suseno's interpretation, the majority of expert witness submissions to the Constitutional Court took the pluralist position that more protection for all religious groups is in fact needed. But the problem of adjudication has not been resolved. It remains to be seen how exactly a judge or a cleric or a politician can claim to know, with the certainty of truth, when religious believers deviate from the central tenets of their faith, whether this deviation is deliberate or accidental, to what extent deviation can be considered a form of injury to communities of believers, and on what grounds people are incited to violence (Fenwick Reference Fenwick2017, 63). Prominent defenders of the blasphemy law such as the Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (MUI) cite well-rehearsed arguments about the need to protect society and public morals, which is reminiscent of the exaggerated UK House of Lords claim in 1979 that blasphemy protects “deeply rooted values in society,” without which “just anything goes” (Jones Reference Jones1980, 132). The MUI claim is that the abolishment of Article 156a will lead to levels of religious deviance that will likely cause extraordinary turmoil and strife, and possibly even the destruction of the public order (Fenwick Reference Fenwick2017, 64). It is hard to imagine a religious justification for the deliberate and willful destruction of the public order, which suggests the MUI had something else in mind when it made its submission to the Constitutional Court. We know that since the democratic transition in 1998 the MUI has been seeking to monopolize its position as the leading fatwa-maker in Indonesia, which includes the authoritative (or final) say over “correct” forms of Islamic belief (Hasyim Reference Hasyim2015).

THE 2016–2017 BLASPHEMY TRIAL OF BASUKI TJAHAJA PURNAMA

In September 2012 Joko Widodo (who goes by the nickname Jokowi) and Basuki Tjahaja Purnama were elected as governor and deputy governor of Jakarta. When Jokowi cut his term short to run for (and win) the presidency in 2014, Purnama, a former mining consultant who began his political career in the remote island of Belitung, inherited the office of governor of Jakarta. In November 2014, 1 month after Jokowi was sworn in as president, Purnama joined Jokowi and many other national political leaders on the popular Metro TV program Mata Najwa, during an episode branded as a “celebration” (merayakan) of Indonesia. Purnama was in the spotlight for one segment of the show and was given the chance to ask former president Megawati Sukarnoputri a series of soft questions about current political trends. He quickly went off script, asking Megawati why she backed Jokowi's presidential bid, when she knew full well that Jokowi's success would mean placing a non-Muslim leader of Chinese descent in the governor's seat, a maneuver that was politically risky for her and was quite unpopular in many parts of the country.Footnote ⁷ Purnama suggested that, given Megawati's standing as a respected elder and key political figure in contemporary Indonesia, she could defend his inauguration by giving some context to the debate and helping the public understand the history of Indonesian nationalism and pluralism, but his appeal fell on deaf ears.Footnote ⁸

The contentious rise of Purnama was met by a political backlash instigated by some national elites who positioned themselves as defenders of “indigenous” (pribumi) Indonesians, in what Leo Suryadinata (Reference Suryadinata2017) calls the re-emergence of pribumi-ism. The numerical supremacy of Indonesia's pribumi population is not enough prevent the spread of anxieties and rumors about the latent threat of ethnic Chinese political and economic dominance (Cochrane Reference Cochrane2014).Footnote ⁹ Despite the personalized attacks made against his identity and character, Purnama maintained high approval ratings throughout his term in office. In September 2016, during the gubernatorial election campaign, a YouTube video emerged showing Purnama addressing residents of Pramuka Island just off the coast of Jakarta. Purnama warned people not to be deceived (dibohongi) by those using Al-Maidah verse 51 to undermine his candidacy. This is a Quranic verse that can be interpreted as forbidding non-Muslims from leading Muslims, meaning that Jakarta's Muslims cannot vote for Purnama, and the verse focuses on the unity and loyalty of the Muslim community (ummah).

In November 2017, an academic named Buni Yani was sentenced to 18 months in prison for uploading a 30 second clip from the blasphemous Purnama video, as well as circulating an edited transcription of Purnama's speech that led to public outcry and was found to constitute hate speech by a district court in Bandung, West Java (Lazuardi Reference Lazuardi2017). In response to Buni Yani's edited video and transcript, the provincial branch of the Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars in South Sumatra filed a police report about Purnama's supposedly blasphemous comments in 2016, and this charge was endorsed by mass religious organizations throughout the country, including the militant Islamic Defenders Front, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, and Muhammadiyah youth groups (Gunn Reference Gunn2018). Mass organizations such as these are known to be influential power brokers in democratic Indonesia, willing and able to weaponize religion to affect political outcomes (Nastiti and Ratri Reference Nastiti and Ratri2018). The supposed insult to Islam and threat to Muslim unity came from Purnama, a Chinese Christian double minority who is a close associate of President Jokowi and has spent most of his political career fighting corruption, reforming bureaucracies, and insisting upon transparency in government.

President Jokowi's rivals sought to turn the 2016 Jakarta elections into a proxy battle for the presidential race in 2019 (Mietzner Reference Mietzner2017). Former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono endorsed his son Agus, while presidential aspirant Prabowo Subianto backed Anies Baswedan in the race against Purnama. Faced with the very real prospect of Purnama securing a popular mandate to govern Jakarta and then running for vice president in 2019, Islamists seized the opportunity to attack Purnama for his alleged blasphemy (Mietzner Reference Mietzner2018, 272). When blasphemy charges were brought against Purnama for his Al-Maidah reference, he already had a reputation as an abrasive, at times even foul-mouthed speaker, though his performance as governor earned him widespread respect in middle- and upper-class districts of Jakarta, as well as international plaudits (Hatherell and Welsh Reference Hatherell and Welsh2017). Part of Purnama's reform agenda included an urban flood prevention system in Jakarta that required large-scale evictions of poor families living near riverbanks, which led Saskia Schafer (Reference Schafer, Slama and Jones2017) to conclude that the tensions surrounding Purnama are explained by the complex interplay of grievances, piety, and anger. Some claim that the former governor's aggressive enforcement of evictions benefits middle-class constituents and property developers while reinforcing the structural disadvantage of the poor and compounding their sense of betrayal (Wilson Reference Wilson2016).

Data from professional polling agencies such as Indikator and Saiful Mujani suggested that Purnama was going to win the first round of elections in February 2017 despite the ongoing blasphemy trial, which turned out to be true, but that he would lose the second-round runoff because voters who supported Agus Yudhoyono (the losing candidate) in the first round would migrate to Purnama's rivals. Anies Baswedan and his deputy seem to have won the electoral runoff by capitalizing on anxieties about electing a non-Muslim, ethnically Chinese governor and by making extravagant spending promises to improve social welfare in Jakarta (Anindya Reference Anindya2017). Though difficult to quantify, the blasphemy trial certainly undermined Purnama's campaign and worked in his opponent's favor, particularly during the second-round electoral runoff that took place between February and April 2017.Footnote ¹⁰

A survey experiment conducted by Nathanael Sumaktoyo (Reference Sumaktoyo2017) during the Jakarta elections determined that the most significant decline in support for Purnama occurred when voters were reminded that Purnama is a Chinese Indonesian minority. The findings suggest that Purnama's ethnicity is more politically significant than his religion. Sumaktoyo's randomized sampling of voters in Jakarta shows that being a Christian did not significantly impact on the levels of support for Purnama, although this survey did not account for the likely vote swing against a blasphemous evangelical Christian, which is a different proposition altogether.

After losing the gubernatorial election Purnama was given a 2-year prison sentence by the North Jakarta District Court, which raises two questions related to Indonesia's Criminal Code. First, in what way did Purnama's reference to Al-Maidah verse 51 constitute animosity toward Islam? Second, how can it be determined that his statement was intended to prevent someone from adhering to Islam? If the procedural integrity of the Indonesian judiciary is to be maintained, at least one of these contraventions must have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. There is little in the trial transcripts or head judge Dwiarso Budi Santiarto's final verdict that suggests these legal criteria have been definitively met. But even if one believes that this procedural test has been met, it still does not resolve the substantive question as to whether there should have been a trial of this kind in the first place.

In a review of 37 blasphemy cases involving charges under Article 156a, the Indonesian Legal Resources Centre raises serious concerns about legal uncertainty and the improper application of the law by judges who cannot remain neutral in cases involving the desecration (penodaan) of religion (Sihombing, Siti Aminah, and Khoirul Roziqin Reference Sihombing, Siti Aminah and Khoirul Roziqin2012, 78). An updated study of 63 blasphemy cases, including 11 prosecutions from 2014, highlights the intervention of religious organizations such as the MUI and the tendency of jurists to base their judgments on information provided by these organizations—the same religious authorities who issue fatwa in the first place—thus ensuring a guilty verdict (Aminah and Roziqin Reference Aminah and Khoirur Roziqin2015). Andhika Prayoga's (Reference Prayoga2015) analysis of the legal proceedings in two blasphemy cases from Sulawesi and Sumatra casts doubt upon the professional conduct of judges, and the author concludes that judges in blasphemy cases are heavily swayed by their private religious beliefs and by the fatwa issued by clerics. It is difficult for judges to resist the social pressure to prosecute, and nearly impossible for them to remain objective in blasphemy trials. These conclusions are reinforced by the Indonesian Institute for the Independent Judiciary, who analyzed 27 blasphemy cases and found judicial institutions do not act in a neutral and objective manner, leading to mistakes in law enforcement, erroneous legal interpretation, and infringements of fair trial principles (Cohen Reference Cohen2018, 99).