Jakarta – A rights watch group wants political parties to play a more active human rights advocacy role in both the legislative and executive arms of the government.

"The success of future human rights enforcement depends on the choice of candidates (to participate in state governance after the current presidential and legislative terms end in 2009)," executive director of The Institute For Policy Research and Advocacy (Elsam), Agung Putri, told a press conference Tuesday.

She said that nine years after the initiation of the 1998 reform movement, respect for human rights was still weak because potential candidates for central and local government offices weren't being scrutinized from that perspective.

Agung noted several improvements in human rights enforcement during the last few years, however most were limited to the reforms linked to formal instruments, such as the adoption of the international Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

She said that while the country had properly adopted international human rights instruments, many ordinances in Indonesia apparently violated international law.

She said that Elsam had discovered 46 ordinances that violated religious freedoms and women's rights. She cited the example of a West Sumatra ordinance requiring head scarves for female Muslim civil servants. She said that none of the 46 ordinances had been reviewed or annulled by the central government.

"Political parties should be accountable for failures in upholding human rights because their people, in either the House of Representatives or the Presidential cabinet, could have taken action to prevent that," she said.

Addressing the same forum, Marzuki Darusman, a former Attorney General and now a Golkar legislator, said that the public needed to demand that political parties add human rights enforcement to their agendas.

For political parties, he said, human rights was only a "survival" issue. "Human rights enforcement is never an organic priority in the agendas of political parties." Parties will only advocate human rights if that issue is of concern to voters, he said.

However, Agung warned of the risk of parties making human rights a part of their election platform but later failing to keep promises.

"We have to see who is behind the political parties to make sure whether they will implement their promises of human rights enforcement or not. If a party is supported by people with bad track records in human rights enforcement, there is a little chance that the party will keep its promises."

She added that political parties had to be independent and self-supportive to prevent external interference with their human rights agendas.

Agung predicted that political parties with human rights as a central campaign issue who were backed by people with good track records on human rights would be in good stead for the 2009 election. (lln)