Muslim trans woman Ratu Thalisa has been sentenced to prison for talking to an image of Jesus on her phone, Christians’ messiah, to get a haircut during a livestream.
An Indonesian court handed Thalisa two years and 10 months’ prison term on Monday.
Thalisa had told the image of Jesus to cut his hair in response to a comment that told her to get a haircut to look more like a man.
Thalisa has 442,000 TikTok followers.
Responding to the two-year-and-10-month prison sentence for hate speech against Christianity handed to the trans woman in Indonesia’s North Sumatra Province over comments made on her TikTok channel, Amnesty International Indonesia’s Executive Director Usman Hamid said the prison sentence “is a shocking attack on Ratu Thalisa’s freedom of expression.”
“The Indonesian authorities should not use the country’s Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) law to punish people for comments made on social media,” added Hamid.
While Indonesia should prohibit the advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, Hamid said Thalisa’s speech act “does not reach that threshold.”
“This sentence highlights the increasingly arbitrary and repressive application of Indonesia’s EIT law to violate freedom of expression,” said the Amnesty International official. “The authorities must quash Ratu Thalisa’s conviction, ensure her immediate and unconditional release and repeal or make substantial revisions of problematic provisions in the EIT Law criminalizing ‘immorality’, defamation, and hate speech.”
