Usman Hamid and Haeril Halim – The lenient treatment by the courts of the four soldiers involved in the March acid attack on human rights defender Andrie Yunus is a blatant whitewash that delivers neither justice nor truth for the victim.
On 10 June, the Jakarta Military Court sentenced four members of the Military's Strategic Intelligence Agency (BAIS) for their roles in the attack. Their sentences range from as little as one and a half years in prison to a maximum of three years. Two were allowed to return to serve in the military after serving their time in prison despite having been found guilty of the attack.
This devastating outcome clearly downplays the severity and impact of the life-threatening attack on Andrie, which left him almost blind in one eye.
It also sets an array of deeply damaging precedents on the rights to freedom of speech, association and peaceful protest. In fact, it puts the very future of human rights campaigns in Indonesia at risk.
Playing semantics to manipulate justice
There is no doubt that the six-week trial in the military court was a sham, with the judges prioritising institutional protection over truth-seeking.
Before the trial even began, the military were publicly campaigning, claiming the acid attack was a 'personal vendetta,' not a coordinated operation. The military court seemed more interested in trying to prove this than digging more deeply into the involvement of other actors in the cowardly attack on Andrie.
Separate investigations recently conducted by the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) and the civil society coalition Advocacy for Democracy Team (TAUD) found that at least 16 perpetrators were involved. But there was no mention of any other actors in the court's judgment.
Rather than identifying those in the command structure who directed the attack, the judges agreed the attack was a spontaneous act by the four soldiers as part of a personal vendetta. The court found they were angered by Andrie's activism, particularly his peaceful protest disrupting a meeting of legislators at a hotel in Jakarta discussing the revision of the Military Law in March 2025.
It is not hard to debunk this finding. Testimonies from witnesses and the defendants themselves confirmed that they only joined BAIS in November 2025 – 6 months after the incident in the hotel.
It is hard to believe that anyone could possibly think that hurling acid in a person's face would not cause serious harm. Yet, to justify the lenient sentences imposed, the judges said the act of the four defendants did not constitute 'serious premeditated assault'. They also said the defendants also did not mean to inflict a serious injury as they only wanted to 'teach Andrie a lesson'.
These carefully crafted semantics point to a lack of impartiality on the part of the judges, and, indeed, the inadequacy of military courts to deal with the case. The judgment protects the institutional integrity of the military, and shields the full chain of command and other actors potentially linked to this incident from scrutiny.
Disinformation against Andrie before the acid attack
The extensive disinformation campaigns launched against Andrie months before the attack, also rebuffs the spontaneous 'personal vendetta' argument. In fact, the case highlights links between online disinformation and offline violence.
To explain, well before the acid attack, Andrie was a victim of a campaign of coordinated disinformation attacks online involving state actors. These were designed to undermine his credibility and delegitimise his work as a human rights defender.
For example, soon after Andrie led his peaceful protest against the revision of the military law on March 15, a video began circulating across social media. It portrayed the activists who staged this protest, including Andrie, as 'foreign agents' seeking to weaken Indonesia's military.
Metadata analysis by Amnesty International shows that the earliest dissemination of this video on the platform took place on 16 March 2025 – the day after the protest. It was done by an account affiliated with Gerindra, the political party led by President Prabowo Subinato.
Shortly afterwards, the same video was posted by at least 31 social media accounts (including Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube) that appeared to be affiliated with 27 different military units. All these accounts posted the video within closely clustered timeframes between 17 and 19 March 2025, with many using identical hashtags.
At least 135 public Instagram accounts – mostly anonymous – amplified this content by posting this same video between 16 and 19 March 2025.
This disinformation campaign was followed by a sustained period of physical intimidation. In the months following the 2025 protests, Andrie reported that military officers and unidentified individuals surveilled the office of KontraS (of which Andrie is a deputy coordinator) at least 22 times.
They would park outside the Jakarta office, photographing staff to create a climate of fear that Andrie described as a 'dirty tactic'. 'The military will stop at nothing to silence us,' he told Amnesty International in 2025.
In these circumstances – coordinated disinformation attacks online and sustained efforts offline to intimidate Andrie – it is impossible to believe that the acid attack was nothing more than the personal vendetta of the four soldiers.
Obstruction of justice
In their judgment, the judges also ordered the destruction of several key pieces of evidence used in the attack. These included the bottle of acid (a form of rust remover), the tumbler used to carry the acid, a used battery, and a flash disk that contained two videos of the crime scene.
The judges said that these pieces of evidence had been fully examined, were only valid for the trial of the four defendants, and were no longer required as evidence in other cases. Therefore, they must be destroyed. The judges claimed this would stop them being reused for 'undesirable purposes.'
This bizarre decision will block any future attempt to independently investigate the case.
The judges made their decision despite a recent order by the South Jakarta District Court for the police to continue investigating the attack. This decision was the result of a pretrial hearing (preperadilan) won by Andrie's team of lawyers. If the four convicted BAIS soldiers do not appeal against their sentences within seven days after the judgment was handed down, the court will move to destroy the key evidence. This means the police must race against time to request the evidence from the military to continue the investigation before it is too late.
In all, this decision confirms that the military proceedings against Andrie's attackers were not much more than a 'show trial' that has not delivered genuine justice or truth, let alone redress, for Andrie Yunus.
In our view, military courts should not have jurisdiction to try members of the military and security forces for human rights violations. Military courts in Indonesia often lack the impartiality, independence, and transparency required under international legal standards for a fair trial. This case is a perfect example of the problem.