On May 27, 2024, Open Net and LBH Pers held a joint seminar at the office of LBH Pers, Jakarta, Indonesia, to strategize on a new constitutional challenge against Indonesia’s mandatory website registration law, which requires all website operators to register with the authorities at the penalty of being blocked within the country. This constitutional challenge is in addition to a lawsuit that Open Net and a coalition of Indonesian organizations sponsored to inquire on the excessiveness of the specific blocking done against independent media websites, together with Paypal, Yahoo!, etc., and that lawsuit is on-going at the Supreme Court of Indonesia.

At this seminar, the partners discussed the possibility of inquiring through a new lawsuit whether the registration requirement itself is unconstitutional under Indonesian constitution and/or infringing international human rights law.

We discussed three different aspects of possible unconstitutionality: (1) registration requirement being a “prior restraint” on freedom of speech; (2) registration requirement infringing right to anonymous speech, and finally (3) the excessiveness of having the blocking as a remedy.