"The application has been checked by the director general of civil registration and I have agreed to issue the birth certificate,” said Jokowi said in a video call to Daya from the Indonesian Embassy in the South Korean capital on Monday, as quoted in the statement from the presidential press bureau.

Daya, a student at Kyungsun University in Busan, 320 kilometers south of Seoul, received an electronic version of her son Airlangga Saka Bratajaya’s birth certificate through a QR code sent to her email.

Jokowi’s direct approval of the birth certificate issuance was part of the launch of the Information System for Service and Protection of Indonesian Citizens Abroad, or Portal Peduli WNI.

The portal has been developed by the Foreign Ministry since 2015 to provide a single service system for Indonesian citizens through Indonesian embassies and consulates.

Through the portal, the Foreign Ministry will have a uniform Indonesian citizen service system throughout all Indonesian representative offices abroad, integrated with all relevant national data centers, and can issue civil registration documents for Indonesian citizens abroad.

South Korea has one of the largest concentrations of Indonesian citizens, with around 40,000 citizens residing there, most of whom work as migrant workers in the formal sector.

Migrant worker protection organization, Migrant CARE, has welcomed the portal, calling it a positive step in migrant-worker protection. Migrant CARE said it hoped the government would follow up by improving the offline service for migrant protection at each public institution or ministry.

The organization’s executive director, Wahyu Susilo, said officials abroad sometimes treated Indonesian workers as “second-class citizens”. (evi)

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