Camelia Pasandaran & Febriamy Hutapea – The central government would strike down a controversial new bylaw mandating that residents of Aceh convicted of adultery be stoned to death if it was found to violate national laws or the country's Constitution, a spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said on Tuesday.
A day after Aceh's Legislative Council passed the bylaw, which was met with massive and unflattering international news coverage, spokesman Andi Mallarangeng said the Ministry of Home Affairs would, as a matter of course, examine the bylaw.
He noted the ministry had struck down hundreds of bylaws passed by regional and local governments for being at odds with national legislation.
"In Indonesia, local government laws cannot go against higher laws, that is, the Constitution and the laws of the country," Andi said. "So any laws that go against a higher law, especially the Constitution – and the Constitution clearly mentions human rights – then it can be cancelled by the central government."
The bylaw, locally called Qanun Jinayah, replaces elements of the Criminal Code with Shariah, or Islamic, law for Muslims.
Yudhoyono himself has not commented on the bylaw that also mandates that residents of Aceh could receive 100 lashes for engaging in sex out of wedlock, up to 400 lashes for child rape, 100 lashes for homosexual acts and 60 lashes for gambling.
The central government has been walking a fine line between enabling Aceh to exercise self-government as part of a 2006 autonomy law and ensuring the independently minded province remains under national control.
Zulkiflimansyah, a member of the House of Representatives from the conservative Islamic-based Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), said on Tuesday that Yudhoyono should publicly clarify the bylaw amid fears that it would apply to non-Muslim residents of Aceh.
He also said he supported the bylaw as being an application of Shariah in Aceh, and that it wasn't aimed at turning secular Indonesia into an Islamic state.
He was backed by fellow legislator Ferry Mursyidan Baldan of the Golkar Party, who chaired a team that deliberated the Aceh autonomy bill in 2006. "[The bylaw] can't spread to other provinces. It will only be applied in Aceh, which has special autonomy," he said.
Refly Harun, a former staff legal expert at the Constitutional Court, said that since the bylaw had been passed by the legislative council in Aceh, it was now in force even if it was deemed as unconstitutional or against principals of human rights.
"As long as there is no statement from a legal institution that it is not constitutional, people should obey it," he said, adding that opponents can request a judicial review of the bylaw with the Supreme Court.
"As it is a bylaw, people should file it to the Supreme Court," he said. "It is not advisable for the [central] government to use its power to intervene with the law as it may anger the local people and sharpen the conflict there."
The passage of the bylaw has sparked strong criticism from human rights groups in Aceh and other parts of the country.
The Civil Society Network for Shariah Care, based in Aceh, has requested the provincial government legalize the law and then revise its articles, saying civil society groups were not invited to participate in deliberations.
The network, comprised of 19 groups, also warned that the bylaw could cause social unrest and disturb the war-torn province's peace process.
Ifdhal Kasim, chairman of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) in Jakarta, also slammed the new bylaw for being cruel and degrading.
"This will bring Aceh back to the past. Throwing stones is like Aceh in the 14th or 15th century," Kasim was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying.
Kamala Chandrakirana of the National Commission on Violence Against Women on Tuesday called for the country's human rights groups to file a challenge in the Constitutional Court against the 2006 Law on Governing Aceh, which forms the basis of the stoning bylaw.
"Lashes and stoning people to death are a cruel, humiliating and degrading [punishment]," she said. "We don't need to wait until it's applied to know that it is unconstitutional. Human rights and pro-democracy organizations should file a judicial review to the Constitutional Court."
Kamala said the Yudhoyono administration should launch a detailed review of controversial bylaws and annul them, saying "there are more than 154 discriminative bylaws applied by 69 district governments in Indonesia."