Pontianak court opens a class action over Borneo fire haze

A class action over wildfire haze opened in Pontianak on 7 October. Four plaintiffs, including a local chapter of the Indigenous organisation AMAN, accuse the Indonesian state of gross negligence. President Prabowo Subianto and the governor of West Kalimantan are among 10 defendants. None of the 10 appeared at the first hearing. Chief judge Rina Lestari Br Sembiring sat on the case. The plaintiffs' lawyer, Glorio Sanen, who coordinates the Nafas Kalbar legal team, said afterwards that the suit was a step to address annual fires.

The fires the suit describes have already done ordinary damage in West Kalimantan. Smoke has closed schools. Hundreds of people have sought medical help for respiratory illness. The plaintiffs say officials failed to deal with fires that return each dry season, made worse this year by an intense El Nino and by forest destruction. They want the government to declare a national disaster, which would open a wider set of recovery, rehabilitation and healthcare measures than a provincial response.

A national disaster declaration is a legal status, not a slogan. Under Indonesia's disaster law it shifts coordination to the national agency and unlocks funds and rules that a governor cannot switch on alone. The plaintiffs are asking a court in Pontianak to push the president toward that status, on the argument that the 2026 haze is not a local accident. Sanen has framed the claim as negligence: a failure to prevent and to respond, not a claim that the president set the fires.

The empty defence table at the first hearing is a procedural fact. Ten defendants were named. None attended. A first hearing can proceed to scheduling without them, and a later hearing can compel a reply. What it cannot do is produce a government account of how many hectares burned, how many schools closed, or how many patients were logged with respiratory complaints. Those numbers are the gap in the public file so far. The plaintiffs have described hundreds seeking care and schools shut. They have not, in the reports of the hearing, filed a single official tally the court has accepted.

West Kalimantan is on the Indonesian part of Borneo. Haze from fires there does not stay inside the province. In earlier bad years smoke crossed into Malaysia and Singapore and became a diplomatic argument as well as a health one. The 2026 suit is filed at home, against domestic officials, and it uses the language of negligence and disaster status rather than transboundary liability. That choice keeps the case inside one court and one set of defendants.

El Nino is the climate fact the plaintiffs put in the claim. An intense El Nino dries the peat and the logged forest that burn. Forest destruction is the land-use fact. Peat that has been drained for plantations burns below the surface and sends smoke for weeks. A negligence case has to connect those conditions to a duty officials held and did not meet. The first hearing did not test that link. It opened the file.

The names to keep are the ones on the record: Pontianak, 7 October, judge Rina Lestari Br Sembiring, lawyer Glorio Sanen, AMAN's local chapter among four plaintiffs, Prabowo and the West Kalimantan governor among 10 defendants, and a request for a national disaster declaration. The next hearing is the one that will show whether the state answers, and with what count of land burned and people treated.