Anti-discrimination law on the wat

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Thu, 02/09/2006 10:44 AM

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A new citizenship bill will eliminate the ethnic and racial discrimination that exists in the current law, a legislator says.

Lawmaker Slamet Effendy Yusuf, who heads a working team to discuss the final form of the bill, said the House of Representatives would revise Law No. 62/1958 on citizenship, which was widely deemed ""discriminatory, not respecting human rights and gender-biased"".

""We want to eliminate all (the biases). The existing law does not recognize the rights of children from mixed marriages. The bill will eliminate this,"" he said Wednesday.

Last week, the working team unanimously agreed to include limited dual citizenship among articles for deliberation.

That decision was unexpected because the two separate draft laws designed by the House and the government had both banned dual citizenship.

The team also scrapped other discriminatory articles in the citizenship bill, including those that distinguished ""indigenous Indonesians"" from people from other countries who had become Indonesian citizens.

Slamet said the ""indigenous Indonesian"" clauses could cause discrimination in society because they treated people differently.

""Therefore, we have now defined 'indigenous Indonesians' as those people who are Indonesian citizens without going through a naturalization process,"" he said.

Separately, another House team discussed a bill Wednesday to protect citizens from other forms of ethnic and racial discrimination.

The team invited senior researcher Harry Tjan Silalahi of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), constitutional law expert Satya Arinanto and former human rights minister Hasballah M. Saad to speak to the meeting.

Harry said the antidiscrimination bill, the citizenship bill, the civil registration bill and the immigration bill, would safeguard citizens from prejudice if the House passed them into law.

""It would be a milestone. If you do it right, Indonesia would be able to say confidently to the international community that there was no more discrimination in the country. If there was, it would not have been caused by state policy,"" he said.

Satya suggested the bill increase the fines imposed on violators to help make it effective.

""I think Rp 1 million (US$108) for discriminating against others is not enough. You have to think about the future,"" he said.

The Jakarta administration planned to fine residents caught smoking in enclosed public spaces a maximum of Rp 50 million, he said.

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