How Posting a Story Can Lead to a Year of Surveillance Without Prison

A content creator from Palangka Raya, Zhezhe Galuh, began serving a sentence in June 2026 that is rarely understood by the public: not prison, but a period of supervision. Based on Palangka Raya District Court Decision No. 324/Pid.Sus/2025/PN Palangka Raya, she was found guilty of sending electronic information containing a direct threat of violence. Instead of sentencing her to 4 months in prison, the judge chose to impose a 7-month supervision period as an alternative. Physically, she appears free to move about, but her status remains that of an active convict until early October 2026. According to her legal counsel, another report for defamation could have fatal consequences for her.

This case is not an anomaly, but a new form of Indonesia’s sentencing system following the National Criminal Code (Law No. 1 of 2023), which effectively came into force on 2 January 2026. What is at stake is not just the fate of one content creator, but the boundary between citizens’ constitutional right to expression and the state’s authority to limit it.

The old Criminal Code recognised five main punishments: death, imprisonment, confinement, fines, and closure. The National Criminal Code changes these to imprisonment, closure, supervision, fines, and social work. The supervision sentence, regulated in Articles 65, 75, and 76, can be imposed on anyone facing a maximum prison sentence of 5 years, as an alternative considered more humane than confining someone in a cell that is already 187 percent over capacity.

The problem is that digital expression offences, such as defamation under Article 433 of the Criminal Code with a maximum threat of 9 months for verbal and 1 year and 6 months for written defamation, automatically fall into the category that qualifies for a supervision sentence. This means anyone whose post is deemed to defame another person potentially faces not prison, but months of living with a ‘supervised’ status. On paper, this sounds progressive, but its constitutionality is questionable.

Article 28J paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution stipulates that any restriction on citizens’ rights and freedoms must simultaneously meet three conditions: it must be regulated by law, aimed at protecting the rights of others, and in accordance with moral considerations and values in a democratic society. The supervision sentence passes the first condition; it is indeed regulated by law. However, as affirmed by Article 1 paragraph (3) of the 1945 Constitution, a state of law demands more than just formal legality; it demands certainty.

And it is at this point that the supervision sentence is flawed. Article 76 paragraph (7) of the National Criminal Code mandates that the procedures for implementing the supervision sentence be further regulated in a Government Regulation. As of this writing, that Government Regulation has not yet been issued. The existing technical rules only apply to children in conflict with the law, not adults. This means the ‘special conditions’ imposed on a person, such as a prohibition on creating similar content, depend entirely on the judge’s interpretation in the courtroom, without any binding standard guidelines.

This is not the first time such an argument has emerged. In early 2026, 13 law students from the Open University challenged Article 256 of the Criminal Code regarding the obligation to notify authorities of demonstrations to the Constitutional Court, arguing that the article violated the principle of lex certa, where an unclearly formulated criminal norm opens space for abuse of power by officials. The Constitutional Court indeed rejected the lawsuit, but its considerations actually affirmed that a criminal threat is only validly imposed if its elements are cumulative and have clear boundaries. The question now is: can the same standard be applied to the vacuum of technical rules for the supervision sentence? If clarity of norms is a condition for the validity of punishment, what about a punishment whose conditions are determined unilaterally by a judge without any technical framework?

Constitutional law recognises the term ‘chilling effect’, the chilling impact that makes citizens self-censor their expression, not because they are actually punished, but because of the shadow of the criminal threat itself. The case of Zhezhe Galuh demonstrates the most tangible form of this effect: seven months of living with the awareness that one more report could send her to prison without a full trial process from scratch. Physically free, but her freedom of expression is held hostage throughout the supervision period, a duration that is, ironically, longer than the original prison sentence threat itself.

This is what makes the supervision sentence different from ordinary imprisonment. Prison has a definite time limit and ends once the sentence is served. The supervision sentence creates a condition that legal academics refer to as the ‘Sword of Damocles’ effect, a threat that hangs continuously, ready to fall at any time if the convict is deemed to violate conditions that do not even have a clear technical definition.

To be fair, it is important to note that the direction of Indonesia’s digital law reform is not entirely repressive. In April 2025, the Constitutional Court, through Decision No. 105/PUU-XXII/2024, affirmed that the phrase ‘another person’ in the defamation offence of the ITE Law only applies to individuals, not government agencies, institutions, or corporations. This decision stemmed from a lawsuit by environmental activist Daniel Frits Maurits Tangkilisan, who had previously been found guilty for his criticism of shrimp farms in Karimunjawa before being acquitted by the high court. In its considerations, the Constitutional Court essentially conducted a constitutional balancing test: weighing the right to legal certainty in Article 28D paragraph (1) against the right to freedom of expression in Article 28E paragraph (3), and concluded that state institutions do not possess a ‘dignity’ that can be defamed in the same way as a human being. This means the problem with the supervision sentence is not an inherent defect of the law itself, but rather a constitutional gap that has not yet been addressed.