M. Taufiqurrahman, Jakarta – Bowing to demands from a number of groups, the House of Representatives has decided to halt discussions on an anti-discrimination bill that was already in the pipeline.
The decision was made by the House's special committee tasked with deliberating the bill to eradicate ethnic and racial discrimination.
The committee accepted a recommendation from the House legal division that suggested such a law was not necessary given the numerous laws that already regulated the issue.
"After studying input from numerous groups, the House legal division decided that numerous provisions in the anti-discrimination bill were merely repeats of stipulations in other laws, such as Law No. 39/1999 on Human Rights," deputy chairman of the special committee Mufid Busyairi of the National Awakening Party told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.
He said numerous provisions in the draft were also redundant as a number of United Nations covenants against discrimination had been ratified by the Indonesian government.
Such redundancy was first highlighted by the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) and the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), which later dismissed the significance of a new law that would outlaw ethnic and racial discrimination.
The Komnas HAM was firm in its opposition of the bill as the draft law, once passed, would diminish its authority as the sole institution to hear cases of discrimination. Other groups, such as the MUI, alleged that the bill would only favor small and minority groups in the country.
As the bill's title suggests, it seeks to outlaw racial and ethnic discrimination. It was proposed by the House and was being discussed simultaneously with the bill related to civil registration and citizenship.
The House and the government were to decide whether the deliberation of the anti-discrimination bill would continue or not. "If the representative of the government, in this case the justice and human rights minister, suggested that the discussion of this bill should be stopped, we could not decide otherwise," Mufid said.
Advocates of the bill, including scores of non-governmental organizations grouped in the Committee for Eradication of Discrimination from Indonesia, have vowed to press ahead with campaigning for the bill's deliberation.
Swandy Sihotang of the Indonesian Movement Against Discrimination (Gandi), a member of the coalition, said the Human Rights Law did not give details about what was discrimination and what was not. "It just gives a general definition on what can be considered as discrimination," he told the Post.
The coalition has demanded that the bill not only seek to outlaw ethnic and racial discrimination, but also other forms of discrimination. "An exclusive law on discrimination is needed to incorporate numerous stipulations carried by other laws and regulations," he said.