After announcing that they were dropping their claim that ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama had insulted Islam, he was found guilty of blasphemy by prosecutors and sentenced on 9 May to two years in prison.
Commentators have said that the verdict and the sentence represents an outrageous miscarriage of justice and a further, severe, erosion of Indonesia's values of religious pluralism as set out in the Pancasila, the state ideology.
As a Chinese Christian, Ahok is Indonesia’s most prominent ethnic minority politician and was the first non-Muslim governor of Jakarta for over 50 years. His campaign for re-election was overshadowed by the blasphemy allegation against him and he lost the vote in April.
