On April 14, the Indonesian Government and the House...

On April 14, the Indonesian Government and the House of Representatives agreed to discard the draconian 1963 subversion law and put crimes against the state in the country's Criminal Code. Unlike the subversion law, the new articles on crimes against the state do not call for death penalty. All four factions in the lower house - Golkar, the armed forces, the United Development Party and the Indonesian Democratic Party - unanimously agreed to pass a bill revoking the old law. The law was applied in the late 1960s against the Indonesian Communist Party, since banned, for its staging of a bloody coup attempt. It was also used to deal with anti-New Order demonstrations during the late 1970s. In recent years, it was the legal basis to arrest Democratic People's Party (PRD) activists and labor leader Muchtar Pakpahan. In 1997, the National Commission on Human Rights had also called on the Government to repeal the subversion law.