Camelia Pasandaran, Jakarta – Despite intense public criticism of a 2006 joint ministerial decree requiring neighbors' approval for houses of worship, ministers on Monday said the government planned to make it a law.

Rights and tolerance watchdog groups have said the joint decree needed to be revised as it was discriminative to minority religions and was at the core of the string of violence against them in recent years.

"There is no plan to revise the decree, but there has been an idea, also proposed by the House, to upgrade it into a law," Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi said. "That plan is now being discussed" in the House.

The decree, issued by the ministries of religious affairs and home affairs, requires a religious group to obtain the approval of at least 60 households in the immediate vicinity before building a house of worship.

It has been criticized for making it almost impossible for minority faiths to build houses of worship in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation.

Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali confirmed that the decree was to be turned into a law. "The most important function is to calm the people, to prevent an escalation of conflicts," he said. "That's what we are doing now."

Gamawan said the content of the law would be the same as in the decree although "the standards might change slightly". "We only need to find common ground," he said. "We don't see it from the perspective of just one religion, but of all religions."

He said 60 residential signatures of approval were relatively few and shouldn't be too large a hurdle for houses of worship.

Calls to amend the decree resurfaced following recent mob violence against several protestant churches and their congregations in several areas of West Java, including Bekasi, Karawang and Bogor.

Meanwhile, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called on participants of a Koranic reading competition here to help promote tolerance.

"We have to fix the wrong understanding and misinterpretation of the Koran," he said. "For example, no one should use religion as an instrument for violence and terror. Fighting for Islam should be based on good behavior instead of non-Islamic actions."

The younger generation should not wrongly interpret the word "jihad" in the Koran as a path of violence, he added. "Don't use Islamic teachings as a shield to justify terrorism," he said.

"Let us interpret jihad as it is, a fight against lust, poverty, backwardness, corruption and fight to enhance people's welfare and advance the nation."