T

he Jakarta administration will comply with the Constitutional Court ruling that requires building owners to provide smoking rooms, scrapping the ban against the rooms in a gubernatorial decree.

Governor Fauzi Bowo, however, said that the city vowed to strengthen efforts to uphold the smoking ban as regulated in a bylaw.

“We will not stop our efforts in upholding the smoking ban as mandated by the bylaw. We will boost our efforts and we will also seek help from NGOs to help monitor our efforts,” Fauzi said.

The Constitutional Court finalized on Tuesday a judicial review of the 2009 Health Law regarding smoke-free zones, ordering all government and privately owned buildings to “isolate” smokers in a special room.

The plaintiff wanted the word “may” to be scrapped from a clause that reads “workplaces and public places may provide special rooms for smoking”. The court granted the request.

The court ruled that the word “may” in the clause might lead to an absence of “smoking rooms” to accommodate the interests of smokers and members public who wanted to avoid the threat secondhand smoke poses to their health.

As a consequence of the ruling, the Jakarta administration will be forced to annul its 2010 gubernatorial decree prohibiting smokers from lighting up indoors and in smoking rooms.

The decree was an amendment to a 2005 bylaw on air pollution control, which stated that people were not allowed to smoke at all in five types of facilities, namely public transportation, healthcare buildings, schools, children’s areas and places of worship, but allowed smoking in designated rooms in other buildings.

Later, through Gubernatorial Decree No. 88/2010, the city extended the smoking ban in public places and buildings after finding that smoking rooms in buildings did not stop smoke from infiltrating non-smoking areas.

The Jakarta Environment Management Board (BPLHD) based the ban’s extension on laboratory tests that found non-smoking areas were contaminated by smoking rooms when they were available.

The administration’s legal bureau chief, Sri Rahayu, said separately that the city would amend the decree in accordance with the Constitutional Court ruling.

“We will wait for the decision to be promulgated in the State Gazette before making any move,” Sri Rahayu said.

The bureau chief said that the administration would coordinate with BPLHD and the City Health Agency in amending the decree. “It will take maybe two to three months to amend the decree,” she said.

Statistics show tobacco consumption has grown by 26 percent over the last 15 years, placing Indonesia among the world’s three largest tobacco consumers. Data from 2008 revealed that one-third of the country’s 237 million people smoke. More than 60 percent of men smoke and the number of adolescents taking up smoking is on the rise.

The National Commission for Tobacco Control notes that the number of smokers in Indonesia reached 80 million people in 2010, the third-highest worldwide after China and India. Despite international pressure, Indonesia is among the few countries in the world that have neither signed nor ratified the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).