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everal NGOs visited the Constitutional Court on Monday to demand the implementation of a court decree that recognized the rights of indigenous people to customary forests.

Their demand is based on Constitutional Court Decree No. 35/2012 that resulted from a judicial review of Law No. 41/1999 on forestry submitted by the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples (AMAN) and two indigenous communities.

In the decree, the court decided to delete the word “state” from the law’s Article 1, Point A, which previously stipulated: “A customary forest is state forest located in the area of indigenous communities.”

The verdict means that many hectares of forests that belong to the country could now be acknowledged as customary forests.

“However, not a single customary forest has been acknowledged by the central government,” said Yance Arizona, executive director of Epistema Institute.

According to Epistema Institute data, a research and knowledge management center on law, society and environment, only 15,557 hectares of customary lands in the country have been acknowledged by local governments, while the estimated area already claimed by AMAN is 84 million ha.

Constitutional Court chief justice Arief Hidayat said that there was no executorial institution to ensure the decree was implemented.

“It takes time to implement the decree in our community even though court decrees are final and legally binding,” Arief said, adding that economic factors related to the use of customary forests by businesses and locals could not be ignored.