On 29 April 2026, the Indonesian Government, through the Minister of Human Rights Natalius Pigai, announced that they would form an Assessment Team to determine who qualifies as a human rights defender or activist. “There will be a team, an assessment team. That team will choose whether a person is an activist or not,” Pigai stated. The assessor team will be constituted of members of different sectors including government, civil society, and law enforcement. Assessment will determine whether the person is eligible to protection as a human rights defender.
Recent developments have shown the urgent need for such protection mechanisms for human rights defenders. The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) has identified a recent increase in threats against human rights defenders following the attack on prominent civil society leader Andrie Yunus. The policy plan overlaps with existing regulations, such as the Law on Environmental Protection and Management, which includes provisions protecting environmental defenders from criminal prosecution.
Civil society actors have raised concerns regarding the potential determination of who has the right to be a human rights defender from the government’s perspective, raising alarm particularly about the involvement of law enforcement in the determination. Given the high number of human rights violations and the criminalization of defenders or activists by law enforcement, the proposal thus risks restricting human rights advocacy. Under international norms, a human rights activist is any individual or group that fights for the inherent rights of every human being. Rather establishing subjective and prone to abuse process for determining human rights defenders status, the Ministry of Human Rights should focus on developing policies and systems to protect HRD from the threats they have faced.