JAKARTA, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- Indonesia turned a page by ripping up a 50-year-old law that allowed the government indiscriminately to ban books it considered dangerous or too controversial.
Human rights groups said freedom of speech to a leap forward when Indonesia's constitutional court struck down the book banning law that has been in place since the days of former President Suharto in the 1960s.
Successive governments have used it to clamp down on any form of public dissent, to bolster public order and to improve sensitive national security situations.
Suharto was well known for cracking down on dissent during his 32-year rule up to 1998. But since then, there has been a gradual widening of freedom expression for the nation's nearly 240 million people, the vast majority being Muslim.
Even so, in the past six years, the law was used to ban 22 books. Most have dealt with the 1965 coup attempt but one dealt with the mass killing of suspected communists in 1965 and 1966, another on the insurgency and free-Papua movement in Papua and two books were on religion.
The legal challenge to the law was mounted by several authors and publishers who argued that the government's banning powers curtailed freedom of expression.
In the landmark verdict, the Constitutional Court took away the powers of the Attorney General's Office to unilaterally ban books, saying such power should rest with a judicial court.
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