UNAIR NEWS- LP3S held another Scholarium event for the fourth time on Tuesday afternoon, August 31, 2021, themed “Academic Freedom and Power Intervention”. One of the speakers invited to the event that afternoon was UNAIR’s Human Rights expert, Dr. Herlambang P. Wiratraman.
Herlambang explained that academic freedom is a human right that has been regulated in Article 13 of the International Convention of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). There are two components of academic freedom, the freedom for members of the academy such as lecturers and students to express opinions and carry out their functions without discrimination and repression, and the freedom and independence of the university as an institution to exchange knowledge and ideas.
The repression and intervention of power on campus autonomy and academic freedom is a problem that has existed since the colonial era. In the past five years, Herlambang said that such incidents in the Indonesian academic world have increased. The models of repression he showed in his material were digital attacks to disrupt the course of an academy activity or to silence expert’s opinions, such as the hacking actions during the protest on the revision of KPK Law, the hacking on Pandu Riono’s social media accounts. There were also criminalizations or pressures on scholars and students critical to certain public policy, such as the imprisonment of Saiful Mahdi from Unsyiah and the summoning of BEM UI’s President Leon Alvinda after the ‘Jokowi’s Lip Service’ post.
“Moreover, the perpetrators of these attacks and criminalizations are effectively acting with impunity, free from any forms of sanctions and accountability from the authorities. Some intensification of the repression of academic freedom also occurs in a pandemic landscape that is full of nuances of controlling information such as excessive hoax labeling, counter-narrative dominant regimes from buzzers, and toxic positivity-based journalism,” said the LP3ES researcher.
Herlambang gave an example of the case of Unsyiah lecturer Syaiful Mahdi who was imprisoned for three months after criticizing campus policies via a Whatsapp group. He was sentenced to use Article 27 paragraph (3) of the ITE Law related to defamation, a multi-interpretative article. When Saiful only criticized the institution without mentioning a name and was still in the corridor of academic freedom. In the trial, expert testimony from the government, Prof. Henry Subiakto, was also not considered by the judge.
“Events like this are more in line with Indonesia’s falling back into authoritarianism. In academic freedom, the intervention of power to academic freedom is not the same as the ‘New Order’ era, which eliminated or killed critical academics. Instead, the men in power mostly affected oligarchic political economy interest has influenced experts to support government policies that are actually anti-science,” emphasized the former Director of HRLS UNAIR.
The HTN expert closed his explanation by saying that academic freedom still tends to be absent in Indonesian Law at high levels, such as the Higher Education Law, where the regulation is within a limited normative framework. It is multi-interpretative and vulnerable to being held hostage to certain political-economic interests. He had emphasized that Indonesia had ratified the ICESCR in 2005.
“More concrete regulations can be found in the Surabaya Principles on Academic Freedom endorsed by SEAHRN and SNP Komnas HAM No. 5 concerning the Right of Freedom of Opinion and Expression,” concluded Herlambang.
Author: Pradnya Wicaksana
Editor: Nuri Hermawan (AC/AP)
