Balancing Privacy Rights and Legal Enforcement:
Indonesia Practices
Presented at The 2011 IAITL Legal Conference Series
Cyprus: 19-22 September, 2011
Sinta Dewi
Lecturer at Faculty of Law, Department of Law and Technology University of Padjadjaran Bandung, Indonesia
Abstract. This paper describes and analyses the regulatory
environment of privacy protection in Indonesia relating to government legal enforcement, particularly in the corruption and national security investigation. After the Suharto era, the Indonesian political architecture became more democratic and privacy conscious. Privacy is protected in Indonesia as one of the fundamental human rights and is regulated in the Constitution. However, the increased level of corruption and national security issues in Indonesia has prompted the government to apply wiretapping regulation. This paper will discuss the intersection between privacy protection and government legal enforcement and how far these two rights could be balanced.
1. Introduction
Since first introduced in United States by Warren and Brandheis in 1890, the concept privacy as a right to be let alone privacy become a debatable issues due to the wide range of rights physical privacy in the home or office, the decision relating reproductive without government interference, freedom from surveillance 1 and information privacy where involves the storing, collection and handling personal information. From the European countries approach privacy considered as one of fundamental human rights. Privacy is well develop in western society because privacy found in the old social practices in the norms of western societies where people began to differentiated between public and private realm2.
Although privacy right is a well recognised right, there is still no acceptable definition of privacy3 due to the wide range of its application. One of the debatable
issues relating to the privacy right in the modern world is the Big Brother metaphor as depicted by George Orwel’s - a totalitarian government where the government can constantly monitoring and spying people. One of Big Brother’s methods is
1 James Waldo el al, Engaging Privacy and Information techonogy in A Digital Age, (2007) , p. 1.
