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Law Banning Blasphemy Is Upheld in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s Constitutional Court ruled 8 to 1 Monday that a controversial 45-year-old law banning religious blasphemy was constitutional.

The law allows the attorney general’s office to ban religious groups that “distort” or “misrepresent” official faiths and calls for up to five years in prison for anyone found guilty of heresy.

The law also limits the number of officially recognized religions to six: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism.

In practice, the law is applied primarily to perceived offenses against mainstream Islam; nearly 90 percent of Indonesia’s 240 million people are Muslims.

The court’s chief justice, Mohammad Mahfud, said the law did not contradict the country’s 1945 Constitution or its national ideology, known as Pancasila, which nominally guarantee freedom of religion.

Several fundamentalist Islamic groups, which have gathered during hearings since the court took up the case in November, rallied outside the courthouse again on Monday as 600 riot police officers looked on.

The Islamic Defenders Front, a militant group that has attacked religious pluralism rallies in the past, attacked lawyers seeking to repeal the law during the final hearing last week.

The judicial review was first sought by a coalition of human rights groups led by the Wahid Institute, an organization founded by Indonesia’s late president, Abdurrahman Wahid, that campaigns for religious pluralism.

“This is a setback for Indonesian democracy,” said Uli Parulian Sihombing, a human rights lawyer and part of the team that filed the challenge.

Supporters of the law say it is necessary to prevent conflict among religious groups.

The 1965 decree was cited in 2008 when the government all but banned Ahmadiyah, an Islamic sect that does not believe that Muhammad is the last prophet — a central tenet of Islam.

In 2007, the Indonesian Supreme Court sentenced Abdul Rachman, who claims to be the reincarnation of Muhammad, to three years in prison.

The police also arrested Ahmad Moshaddeq, the leader of an Islamic sect known as Al Qiyada, on charges of blasphemy in 2007, even after he declared that he had realized his teachings were misguided and would return to mainstream Islam.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Law Banning Blasphemy Is Upheld In Indonesia. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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