Developments from April 2012-March 2013 In 2012-2013, there have been a number of positive developments taken by the Government of Indonesia. For example, in January 2012, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the President of Indonesia, granted a clemency request submitted by Deni Setia Maharwan, a drug convict. The President commuted Maharwan’s sentence from death to life imprisonment, through the Presidential Decree number 7/G/2012, on 25 January 2012. In December 2012, Indonesia abstained from voting the UN resolution on the moratorium of the death penalty in the UN General Assembly. This is a progressive step since in the last three resolutions Indonesia had always voted against the resolution. These two actions seem to confirm political statements made by the President himself and Marty Natalegawa, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, indicating that Indonesia is moving towards the abolition of the death penalty.

LBH Masyarakat presents you the November 2012-January 2013 edition of CAVEAT. Initially, CAVEAT was to be published in early January as a November-December 2012 edition. However, due to New Year’s holiday, we needed to adjust the publication of that edition. Following this edition, CAVEAT will be published as usual, every two months.

Law enforcement measures inevitably involve a contradiction: on the one hand they aim to create order by imposing certain restrictions on freedoms and liberties, while on the other hand they must honor liberties and freedoms of every individual that they limit. Humans inherently are endowed with rights, and when these rights are derogated from them, their humanity is undermined. A question then arises, in the event of a crime that poses a threat to public order what are we supposed to do with the perpetrators of the crime?

LBH Masyarakat presents you the September-October 2012 edition of CAVEAT, a bimonthly analysis of Indonesia’s human rights situation. In Human Rights, Law, and Politics column, Alex Argo Hernowo, LBH Masyarakat’s Justice Sector Reform Program Coordinator, writes about the progress, or lack thereof, of the Indonesian Criminal Procedure Code reform process, that has somehow stagnated at the bottom of the government’s and parliament’s list of priorities for much of the last decade. In his article entitled The Amendment of the Indonesian Criminal Procedure Code: Quo Vadis, Hernowo discusses one of the key arguments of why the present Criminal Procedure Code (KUHAP) is deeply inadequate to provide the necessary human rights protections during criminal proceedings. He continues by elaborating two of the many fundamental issues in relation to Indonesian criminal procedure law, namely: the concept of criminal procedure and the rules on evidence. Hernowo argues that the lack of good political will from the government and the parliament has severely impaired the reform process of the Criminal Procedure Code. It is rather worrying that they are preoccupied with hastily passing bills that are less crucial to the development of Indonesian legal environment, whereas the deliberations regarding this strategic law have been practically in a limbo.

LBH Masyarakat proudly presents you the new format of CAVEAT, a bimonthly analysis of Indonesia’s human rights situation. Some of you may know that from 2009 to 2010 we published CAVEAT as many as sixteen editions every month. However, due to some technical issues, we decided to discontinue the publishing. Now LBH Masyarakat is re-publishing CAVEAT in a slightly different format. The new development is adjusted to reflect the nature of our work. CAVEAT will consist of four columns: Human Rights, Law, and Politics; Human Rights, HIV, and Drug Policy; From Our Archives; and A Letter from Jember.