Editorial: Terror against activists at home as Indonesia chairs the UN Human Rights Council

The current administration remains a walking contradiction in the face of human rights

Artwork by Liana Tan

How ironic it is that Indonesia holds the presidency of the United Nations Human Rights Council, setting the global human rights agenda, while back at home, a human rights activist suffered an acid attack.

Andrie Yunus, Deputy Coordinator of the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS), is well known as an advocate and critic of military encroachment into civilian administration. Due to the nature of his work, civil society groups have renounced that Andrie’s attack was targeted and therefore can be classified as a premeditated murder attempt.

The UN secretariat’s own Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has condemned the attack as “horrific”. This shows a jarring disconnect between our diplomatic posturing on human rights in Geneva and the bleeding reality of civil society at home.

For over two decades, KontraS has done the grueling, necessary work of documenting state-sponsored abuse and demanding accountability from institutions that prefer to operate in the dark. And for over two decades, the state has allowed a culture of impunity to choke rights defenders.

In 2004, KontraS founder Munir Said Thalib was murdered, poisoned with arsenic on a Garuda Indonesia flight. More than twenty years later, the masterminds remain untouched. The case is technically still open; the system’s way of ensuring it goes nowhere. On 3 March 2026, nine days before the attack, Andrie was one of the advocates representing the Solidarity Action Committee for Munir (KASUM) that submitted a letter to the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) to demand a resolution for Munir’s murder by bringing the actual perpetrators to justice.

Usman Hamid, former KontraS Coordinator and current Director of Amnesty International Indonesia, has faced endless death threats. Other former KontraS coordinators, Haris Azhar and Fatia Maulidiyanti, were dragged through exhausting criminal defamation trials for daring to connect a high-ranking public official to mining interests in Papua. The KontraS office has been bombed more than 3 times in terror attacks, in addition to countless acts of intimidation. And now this acid terror attack.

We cannot keep treating these attacks against rights activists as isolated tragedies. They are data points in a long-standing pattern of intimidation. When activists are threatened, sued, or physically harmed without consequence, the authorities are practically sending a clear, unofficial directive: speaking truth to power in this country carries a lethal risk, and the state will not protect you. Worse, they might be out to get you…

Andrie’s attack is clearly specific and targeted. Beyond his daily work at KontraS, he is a driving force in the Coalition for Security Sector Reform and KASUM. He spends his time fighting for actual civilian oversight of the police and military—both institutions that have historically (and fiercely) resisted public accountability. A violent attack on an advocate and pro-democracy figure committed to this specific work is never a random street crime but a calculated message.

On Wednesday, 18 March 2026, the Indonesian Military announced that it had detained four of its personnel in relation to this attack—an apparent admission that the military is indeed behind this terror attack. The four have been identified as agents of the military’s strategic intelligence body (BAIS). Separately, the Jakarta Metropolitan Police also announced that they have identified four suspects, but have not ruled out the possibility of there being more.

In line with the civil society coalition’s demand, we urge the government to establish a dedicated, independent task force to investigate this attack. We do not need another ad-hoc committee designed to quietly dissolve as the news cycle moves on. We need a transparent process with a hard mandate, civilian oversight, and actual consequences for the perpetrators.

The cost of attacking activists has remained comfortably low for decades; their masterminds have largely acted with impunity. If Indonesia wants to look the world in the eye from the seat of the UN Human Rights Council presidency, we have to clean our own house first.