Stricter controls on foreign journalists in Indonesia
Jakarta - The Home Ministry confirmed on Wednesday that the government is preparing a new regulation obliging all foreign journalists to provide reports to regency, municipal and provincial authorities, as well as to the National Intelligence Agency (BIN)
The director general of political and general administration at the Home Ministry, Soedarmo, said the new regulation was a follow-up policy drawn up after ministries and state institutions in charge of supervising foreigners in Indonesia, with the Foreign Ministry as the leading institution, agreed that it was important to monitor all activities of foreign journalists in Indonesia.
He said that as the new regulation required all foreign journalists to get permission from the local authority of wherever they wanted to carry out reporting assignments, the Home Ministry had issued circulars to all local governments across the archipelago to remind them to comply with the new regulation.
“The circulars were sent this month. The new regulation requires foreign journalists as well as foreign TV crews who want to report or to conduct research in Indonesia to get prior permission. Earlier, we did not have such a regulation so we didn’t know how to supervise their activities in Indonesia,” Soedarmo told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.
“We’ll let them do whatever assignments they want in Indonesia, but they need to have permission first. In any country in the world there must be permission [for foreign journalists to compile reports],” he added.
