A court in Indonesia has actually sentenced a trans lady to nearly 3 years in jail for an online talk about Jesus Christ’s hairstyle.
Ratu Thalisa, a Muslim lady with over 442,000 TikTok fans, was condemned by a court in Medan city, Sumatra, on Monday for spreading out hatred under the online hate-speech law.
Ms Thalisa, understood online as Ratu Entok, was livestreaming on 2 October 2024 on TikTok, when an audience asked her to cut her hair like a guy. She reacted by holding up a photo of Jesus Christ and resolving it: “You need to not look like a lady. You need to cut your hair so that you will appear like his daddy”.
She was detained in October after 5 Christian groups submitted a problem to the authorities for blasphemy. Ms Thalisa was charged and arraigned with blasphemy and hate speech versus a specific religious beliefs.
The district court stated her remarks might interrupt “public order” and “spiritual consistency” as the judges sentenced her to 2 years and 10 months in jail and purchased her to pay 100,000,000 IDR (₤ 4,711) in fine for the offense.
Rights groups have actually condemned the sentence for an attack on Ms Thalisa’s “flexibility of expression” and the abuse of Indonesia’s Electronic Details and Deals (EIT) law.
“While Indonesia needs to restrict the advocacy of spiritual hatred that makes up incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, Ratu Thalisa’s speech act does not reach that limit,” Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia, stated in a declaration.
“This sentence highlights the progressively approximate and repressive application of Indonesia’s EIT law to break flexibility of expression,” he stated, advising the federal government to quash Ms Thalisa’s conviction.
District attorneys right away appealed Monday’s decision, which was less than their need for a sentence for more than 4 years, BBC reported.
Mr Hamid advised the authorities to reverse or make modifications to “bothersome arrangements” in the EIT law, which was changed in 2016 to deal with online character assassination. Critics of the law have actually raised issues about the possible abuse of the law “to reduce human rights protectors and opposition figures”.
A minimum of 421 individuals were charged and founded guilty with declared offenses under the law while exercising their flexibility of expression in between 2019 and 2024, Amnesty International stated.
Social network influencers have actually been targeted for blasphemy, consisting of a Muslim lady, who was imprisoned for 2 years in September 2023 after publishing a TikTok video of her stating an Islamic prayer before consuming pork.