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Official finding Spiritual healing, divination, and mediumship Spiritual healing and mediumship Indonesia · 2026

Indonesia: the new criminal code makes claiming supernatural power to cause harm a crime — with no convictions yet

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Record class

Context only

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

the Indonesian state, legislating against claimed supernatural coercion

Organization

Republic of Indonesia (Undang-Undang No. 1 Tahun 2023)

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

This is the rare instance of a legal system naming this database's own mechanism directly: the offence is not the harm but the CLAIM of power to cause it — which is precisely how supernatural coercion works, since the threat alone secures compliance.

  • Curse or witchcraft threat
  • Threatened spiritual consequence

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2026-01-02 · statute in force; no prosecutions identified

    Republic of Indonesia — Article 252, Undang-Undang No. 1 Tahun 2023 (new KUHP). Article 252 of Indonesia's new criminal code, in force from 2 January 2026, criminalises declaring oneself to possess supernatural power capable of causing illness, death or suffering, carrying up to one year and six months' imprisonment and a fine of two hundred million rupiah, increased by a third for habitual practice. As of mid-July 2026, roughly six and a half months after it took effect, searches of Indonesian court and news sources identified no prosecution or conviction under the article.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • the criminalised conduct is the CLAIM itself — declaring oneself able to cause illness, death or suffering by supernatural means

Cited record

Sources

legal news court reporting statutory analysis Hukumonline: legal analysis of Article 252 of the new KUHP.

Indonesian legal-information service's analysis of the provision.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis
https://www.hukumonline.com/ Corpus classification: legal-news-court-reporting; evidentiary role: statutory-analysis.
Retrieval
2026-07-27 · Retrieval failed
Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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