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Trial For Playboy Editor's Appeal Starts In Jakarta
JAKARTA - Indonesia's highest court was legally wrong to sentence the former editor of the country's version of Playboy magazine to prison for indecency, his lawyer told a judge as his appeal started Wednesday.
Earlier this month prosecutors arrested Erwin Arnada, who the Supreme Court sentenced in August to two years in jail despite an absence of nudity in the publication, after he ignored three orders to surrender.
"I don't have any witness or new evidence in this case. The base for the appeal is a mistake by the high judges in deliberating the sentence," Arnada's lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis told the South Jakarta district court.
Under Indonesian legal procedures an appeal against a Supreme Court decision starts at the lower level but is then ruled on by the higher body.
"There is an error in the ruling as the press law should have been considered in this specific press-related case," the lawyer said.
The Supreme Court used criminal law to rule on Arnada, as requested by prosecutors.
"I trust this case to the lawyer whether I win or not," Arnada was quoted as saying by the Detik news website, while making a victory gesture with his fingers.
The case is seen as a marker of growing Islamist influence in the Muslim world's largest democracy, after hardliners launched violent protests against the magazine when it appeared in 2006 and pushed the Supreme Court to overturn the editor's initial acquittal.
The stick-wielding Islamic Defenders Front has condemned Arnada as a "moral terrorist" and ordered its militants to track him down when he was out of detention.
The magazine published only a few issues, none of which contained nudity, before it was forced to close.
AFP
