Jakarta. In a move reeking of desperation, the police have resorted to charging former TV host Cut Tari under an antiquated law for her alleged appearance in a homemade sxx video with Indonesian singer Nazriel “Ariel” Irham.
Police had initially tried to prosecute the celebrity under the Criminal Code or the 2008 Anti-Pxrnxgraphy Law but failed.
Lawyer Hotman Paris Hutapea said on Thursday that since the video was allegedly made in 2005 and the Anti-Pxrnxgraphy Law could not be applied retroactively, police had resorted to using an emergency law from decades earlier.
“Police gave up on the Anti-Pxrnxgraphy Law a month ago, and have now turned to an emergency law issued in 1951, when Indonesia was still a federal state,” Hotman said at the South Jakarta District Court.
The lawyer said he himself was confused by the new charges against the woman, because the emergency law was issued at a time when the provisional Constitution was still in force, and it “used the old version of the Indonesian language which is hard to understand today.”
Hotman cited Paragraph 3 of Article 5 of the 1951 law as stating “If an act is considered a crime but cannot be shown to be a crime according to existing laws and the Criminal Code, then hukum adat is applicable.”
Hukum adat, or customary law, is a set of local and traditional laws and dispute resolution systems.
Hotman said that under this form of law, a prison sentence of between three months and 10 years could be handed down.
The documents for the case against Cut have moved back and forth between the police and the Attorney General’s Office over the last couple of months with neither coming to a conclusion, Hotman said.
“The Anti-Pxrnxgraphy Law has been dropped from the charge documents. Now they are using Article 282 [on indecency] of the Criminal Code along with the 1951 emergency law,” he said.
“The change was made based on an instruction by prosecutors.”
Another key obstacle to the completion of the case is the fact that police are unable to ascertain the location where the sxx video involving Cut and Ariel was filmed, as both suspects claim they cannot remember where the video was taped.
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