Indonesia made Marsinah a national hero. Her killing stays closed.

Marsinah was 24 and worked at a watch factory in East Java. In May 1993, days after a strike, she went to the local military command to ask about workmates who were being questioned there. She disappeared, and her body was found in a forest hut with signs of torture. On 10 November last year, President Prabowo Subianto named her a National Hero, the republic's highest honour, which is only given after death. Writing for the Lowy Institute's The Interpreter, Myra Mentari Abubakar argues that the title arrived at the one moment when it cost the state nothing.

The factory owner and several employees were convicted in 1994, then acquitted by the Supreme Court in 1995. Nobody has been charged since. Under the criminal code in force until January this year, a murder could not be prosecuted more than 18 years after it happened, a cut-off called a time bar, so the case ran out in 2011. One door is still open. If the state reclassifies the killing as a "gross human rights violation", a category with no time limit, investigators can start again. In May, on the 33rd anniversary of her death, campaigners asked Komnas HAM, the national human rights commission, to do that. The commission refused, treated it as an ordinary crime, and said it had lost its own 2013 investigation file.

The same pattern is forming around a second case. Fuad Muhammad Syafruddin, a reporter known as Udin, was beaten to death in August 1996 after writing about corruption in Bantul. Police built their case on a confession a court rejected in 1997, and by 2014 they called the killing too old to prosecute. Journalists in Yogyakarta are now pushing for Udin to receive the hero title instead, and on 29 October a deputy social affairs minister backed him for a later round. Abubakar notes that the decree honouring Marsinah also named Suharto, the ruler whose New Order she died under.

Why it matters

The honour and the case file are decided in different rooms, and only one of them can name who did the killing. The thing to watch is the revision of the 1999 Human Rights Law now in parliament, which could give Komnas HAM real power to investigate grave cases. That is the only route back for killings the courts call expired. Indonesia chairs the UN Human Rights Council this year, so the gap between the medal and the file is being read abroad as well.