On June 10, 2026, a Jakarta military court sentenced four Indonesian military intelligence officers to between 1.5 and 3 years in prison for a January 2024 acid attack on Hendry Yulius, a deputy coordinator at the human rights group KontraS. The attack left him with third-degree burns on nearly a quarter of his body and permanent damage to his right eye. Two of the four were also dishonourably discharged.
Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission found at least 13 people involved in planning and carrying out the attack. Only four faced trial, and they did so in a court the military controls.
Indonesia’s own human rights body counted at least 13 people in the operation that left an activist half-blind and scarred. The state prosecuted four. It tried them in a military court, the one venue where the institution under suspicion also holds the keys to the evidence, the docket, and the judges’ careers.
The verdict came down on June 10, 2026. Three marines and an air force officer were sentenced for the acid attack on Hendry Yulius, a deputy coordinator at KontraS, the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence. Yulius had built his reputation criticising the army’s creeping return to civilian life. He did not testify at the trial of the men accused of disfiguring him. He said he did not trust the court to be fair.
That distrust is the story. The gap between what the official investigation found and what the prosecution pursued is not a procedural detail. It is the design.
Nine suspects the prosecution never named
The numbers are blunt. Komnas HAM, Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission, reported in May 2025 that at least 13 individuals helped plan and execute the attack, several of them believed linked to military intelligence. Four were prosecuted. The other nine were left where the investigation found them.
The sentences tell the second half of the story. The court handed down terms of 1.5 to 3 years. Under Indonesia’s Criminal Code, a premeditated assault with corrosive chemicals causing permanent injury can draw up to 12 years. The men who blinded an activist in one eye received a fraction of what a civilian court could have imposed for the same act.
Rianto Adi, a commissioner at Komnas HAM, warned that failing to act on the commission’s list of suspects would amount to “de facto impunity” for those never brought to court. Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia, was more direct: the verdict, he argued, shows the military justice system cannot deliver accountability for grave abuses, and the case should move to a civilian court where higher-level masterminds can be investigated.
Jakarta has watched this script before
Indonesia has run this trial before, with a different victim and the same ending. On April 11, 2017, anti-corruption investigator Novel Baswedan was attacked with acid in Jakarta. Two police officers were eventually tried — in a civilian court, not a military one — and in July 2020 received two-year sentences widely condemned as too light. The pattern held: allegations of higher-level masterminds, public anger, and no serious effort to reach anyone beyond the men who held the bottle.
The machinery that produces this outcome is legal, not accidental. Law No. 31 of 1997 gives military courts jurisdiction over active soldiers, even for ordinary crimes. Law No. 34 of 2004 affirms that soldiers remain subject to general criminal law, yet leaves enforcement to the military’s own system. Moving a serious case to civilian hands requires a political decision the executive has rarely been willing to make.
UN special rapporteur Mary Lawlor warned that trying the case in a military court, and ignoring the alleged masterminds, sends a “chilling message” to every human rights defender in Indonesia. For a foreign infrastructure or mining firm whose project a local activist might one day challenge, the message is just as plain: violence against critics carries a fraction of its civilian cost, and the rule-of-law premium rises accordingly. The court counted to four. The investigation had counted to 13. The distance between those two numbers is where Indonesia’s promise of civilian control over its army quietly goes to die.
Beyond the headline
The power behind it
Behind the story of rogue officers sits the enduring leverage of Indonesia’s security establishment, which still controls the venue, the investigators, and much of the evidence in cases involving its own. Keeping proceedings in military courts, limiting who appears as a defendant, and framing motives as “personal” reflects bargaining power left over from the post-Suharto transition, when civilian leaders traded full accountability for the army’s consent to democratise.
What isn’t being said
No official statement addresses chain-of-command responsibility: who authorised surveillance of the activist, approved the resources, or chose corrosive chemicals as the weapon. By focusing on four field-level perpetrators, authorities avoid asking whether operational orders, budgets, and reporting lines were abused — and whether any current oversight mechanism could stop the next such operation.
The bigger picture
The case opens onto a wider pattern of security forces returning to civilian life through business ventures, territorial commands, and “stability” duties that democratic institutions struggle to oversee. In Indonesia, largely unreformed military justice and lenient sentencing sit beside growing deployments in infrastructure protection and public order, slowly blurring a line between civilian politics and armed power that many citizens believed had been settled in 1998.
Reading the case for risk, not reassurance
With complaints against the trial judges pending and nine named suspects still unprosecuted, three groups have specific reasons to track what Jakarta does next.
- Foreign policy and defence officials
Cooperation programmes that fund or train TNI units risk colliding with Leahy-style human rights vetting if credible abuse allegations go unaddressed. Track the UN OHCHR special procedures communication on the Yulius case at spcommreports.ohchr.org for any Indonesian government reply, which would signal whether accountability policy is shifting.
- Investors and political-risk analysts
Persistent impunity raises the rule-of-law premium for projects that activists or land-rights defenders might contest, particularly in mining, agribusiness, and infrastructure. Read the current text of Law No. 31/1997 and Law No. 34/2004 at peraturan.bpk.go.id, then watch for any draft amendment in parliament altering military court jurisdiction.
- Human rights and civil society monitors
The next test is whether the Attorney General opens new dossiers on Komnas HAM’s list of 13. Monitor the commission’s own press releases and the Supreme Court’s response to the judicial-conduct complaints over the coming months for the first sign of civilian oversight asserting itself.
Explainer
- KontraS
- The Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence, a major Indonesian human rights group founded in 1998 during the fall of the Suharto regime. It documents abuses by security forces and advocates for victims of state violence. Its work on military accountability has made its staff, including Hendry Yulius, recurring targets of intimidation.
- Komnas HAM
- Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission, a state body with a constitutional mandate to investigate abuses and recommend action. It can gather evidence and publish findings but cannot prosecute, leaving enforcement to police and the Attorney General. Its May 2025 report on the Yulius attack named at least 13 suspects, nine more than were ever charged.
- Law No. 31 of 1997
- The statute granting Indonesian military courts jurisdiction over active-duty soldiers, including for ordinary crimes. It is the legal reason the acid attack case stayed inside the military justice system. Reformers have pushed for years to amend it so that serious human rights offences are heard in civilian courts, without success.
- Criminal Code
- Indonesia’s general penal law, overhauled by Law No. 1 of 2023. It sets a maximum of 12 years for premeditated assault with corrosive substances causing permanent injury. The four convicted officers received between 1.5 and 3 years under military proceedings, well below what this civilian provision allows.
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