An Indonesian TikToker, Ratu Thalisa was sentenced to nearly three years in prison for an incident during a livestream.
In the livestream, she was talking to a picture of Jesus on her phone and jokingly told him to get a haircut.
As per BBC, she was responding to a comment that suggested she cut her hair to look more like a man.
On Monday, March 10, a court in Medan, Sumatra, found Thalisa, a Muslim transgender woman guilty of spreading hatred under Indonesia’s strict online hate-speech law.
Because of this, she was sentenced to two years and 10 months in prison and was also charged with blasphemy which is a serious crime in Indonesia.
The court's decision to convict and sentence Thalisa came after several Christian groups filed police complaints accusing her of blasphemy.
In the meantime, human rights organizations, including Amnesty International have strongly criticized the verdict.
Amnesty called it a "shocking attack on Ratu Thalisa's freedom of expression" and demanded that the sentence be overturned.
As per the outlet, they are also urging the government to revise certain parts of the Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) Law, specifically the sections that criminalize immorality, defamation and hate speech which they believe are problematic and restrict freedom of expression.
To note, EIT Law was first introduced in 2008 and later amended in 2016 to include provisions on online defamation. The law was originally intended to protect people rights in digital spaces.
