W

hile the country is still battling child marriage, the government has revealed a plan to issue marriage cards for newlyweds.

The Religious Affairs Ministry is planning to distribute 1 million marriage cards to 500,000 newlywed couples across the country by the end of November. About 2.5 million such cards will be distributed next year.

The government has claimed that the plan would better monitor marriage registration in the country.

Bride-to-be Wenny Iswari said she welcomed the government’s plan to issue marriage cards to complement marriage certificates, because a card was much easier to carry around than the certificate, which comes in the form of a passport-size book.

She further said it would be too risky to take the marriage certificate everywhere as she could lose the very important document.

“With the card, I can just slip it in my pocket,” said the 25-year-old, who plans to marry her fiancé in January. Certain hotels in the country ask couples to show their marriage documents before allowing them to use the hotel’s services.

In addition, Wenny claimed the card — which contains the digital data of the couple as well as their photographs — could prevent both husband and wife from cheating.

“The existing ID cards only show someone’s marriage status, not the photo and data of their spouse. Such an ID card is prone to be misused,” she said.

Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin said the ministry could not provide all existing married couples with the card just yet, as there was a limited budget. “Newlywed couples will be our priority, but those who want the card can ask their local Religious Affairs Office,” Lukman said on Monday, adding that the ministry would still provide married couples with marriage certificates.

The marriage card, Lukman further said, was a complement to a newly launched app called Simkah. Prospective husbands and wives can register their wedding online via the app by entering some required data. The data will then be integrated with the Home Ministry’s Population and Civil Registry Directorate General.

A Jakarta-based activist group, the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR), said the issuance of the marriage cards was not really urgent and had no significant impact on the marriage-related issues in the country such as child marriage.

An ICJR researcher, Maidina Rahmawati, even labeled the new program “unclear and a waste of the state budget”. She urged the government, particularly the ministry, to address more urgent problems such as child marriage, which is still rampant in the country.

In Indonesia, the 2015 National Social and Economic Survey (Susenas) revealed that one out of five women aged 20 to 24 in Indonesia were married for the first time before they turned 18, which means they had experienced what is internationally recognized as child marriage.

Researchers from the Center for Indonesia’s Strategic Development Initiatives (CISDI) said a comparison between provincial-level data on child marriage and stunting by Statistics Indonesia (BPS) in 2015 revealed that provinces with a high level of child marriage also recorded a high prevalence of stunting.

A 2016 study conducted by the Indonesian Coalition to End Child Marriage (Koalisi 18+) in three places with a high prevalence of child marriage — namely Mamuju regency in West Sulawesi, Tuban regency in East Java and Bogor regency in West Java — concluded that religious courts granted child marriage permission without firm restrictions.

The study shows that nearly all of the 377 proposals were granted permission by the respective courts. Only one proposal, in Tuban, was denied because the local court wanted the child’s parents to fulfill the child’s rights as she was only 12 years old at the time.

“The courts accept marriage proposals after only looking at the administrative requirements, without really looking into the urgency of the marriages,” Maidina said. “This is a problem and the government has to end it.”