Margareth S. Aritonang, Jakarta – The government is promoting a decree that requires local governments to formulate local regulations, including sharia rules, that accord with universal standards of human rights.
Joint ministerial decrees No. 20/2012 and No. 77/2012, issued by the Home Ministry and the Law and Human Rights Ministry, respectively, will allow the government to strike down local ordinances, such as the recently proposed bylaw in Lhokseumawe, Aceh, to ban women from straddling motorbikes.
"The decree aims to give guidelines to all local administrations in drawing up regulations so that they do not violate the basic rights of people," Home Ministry legal chief Zudan Arif Fakrulloh told The Jakarta Post.
"With this joint decree, local administrations, for example, cannot impose bans on straddling for women or require students to have a mandatory basic skill in reading the Koran to pass elementary school," he added.
Zudan said that all local governments had to comply with the decree. "All local administrations now have clear guidelines that they must follow," he added.
The decree, issued after the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) asked the Indonesian government to set standards of compliance on a host of issues, from education, healthcare, women's rights, spatial planning and natural resources management.
On education, for example, the joint decree obliges local administrations to allow parents to send their children to any school that meets standards defined by the national educational curriculum.
The decree also requires local administrations to provide equal access to education, regardless of gender or physical disabilities, while instructing local administrations to uphold women's rights in drafting bylaws.
The Home Ministry said that it was now promulgating the decree to the more-than-500 local administrations throughout the archipelago.
"We are now disseminating information on the decree to all government officials in the regions so that they can immediately adopt the ruling. We expect all administrations to register all issued bylaws [with the ministry] by June this year. Then we can document and review all bylaws for bias," Zudan said.
He earlier told the Post that his ministry had repealed almost 2,000 bylaws introduced by municipalities, regencies and provinces across Indonesia since the introduction of regional autonomy in 2002 for provisions that could discriminate against the rights of citizens. However, most of the repealed legislation pertained to financial management and not to the rights of women.
The National Commission on Human Rights said that the issuance of the joint ministerial decree was a laudable effort by the government to prove its commitment to protect the rights of the people.
"The issue of problematic bylaws is among the concerns that we need to deal with this year," Komnas HAM chairman Otto Nur Abdullah said on Monday. "This has caused problems at the national level, although the problem principally occurs in the regions," he said.
Otto cited the commission's report last year, which said that problematic bylaws were among the sources of violence in the regions.