Artidjo Alkostar

Artidjo Alkostar was a prominent Indonesian politician, lawyer, and activist. He was born in Situbondo, East Java, in 1948. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Universitas Islam Indonesia in 1976 and obtained a master's degree from Northwestern University in 2002. He started his career as a lecturer and a public defender in Yogyakarta. He also worked for Human Rights Watch in New York for two years. He became a Supreme Court judge in 2000 and retired in 2018. He was famous for his verdicts that tended to increase sentences for convicted corruption cases and the dissenting opinions he issued in several major cases, such as the case of former President Suharto and the Bank Bali scandal. He was also a critic of both the Sukarno and the Suharto regimes, and he advocated for democracy, human rights, and social justice. He was arrested and detained without trial for 14 years during the anti-communist purge in 1965. He was released in 1979, but he remained under house arrest until 1992. He was also banned from publishing or traveling abroad, and his books were censored and burned by the authorities. He received many awards and honors, such as the PEN Freedom to Write Award, the Magsaysay Award, and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He also served as a member of the Supervisory Board of the Corruption Eradication Commission from 2019 to 2021. He died in 2021, at the age of 72, from complications of diabetes and heart disease.