President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has issued a new regulation ensuring the legitimacy of 20 deputy ministers in his cabinet, after the Constitutional Court declared earlier this week that their appointments were unconstitutional.

Yudhoyono signed the new presidential regulation on deputy ministers on Thursday, but his spokesman Julian Aldrin Pasha only disclosed the new rule on Friday.

"The presidential regulation on deputy minister appointments was signed by the president yesterday and will be announced at the right time and at the right opportunity," Julian told journalists in Ambon on Friday, on the sidelines of the president's working visit to the capital of Maluku.

The president issued the regulation just two days after the Constitutional Court declared in a ruling on Tuesday that the explanatory part of Article 10 of the 2008 Law on State Ministries was unconstitutional.

The court's nine justices said the explanatory section had created uncertainty because Article 9 of the same law ruled that the bureaucratic hierarchy of ministries comprised a minister at the top, followed by the secretary general, directors general and inspector general, without any mention of a deputy minister post.

If deputy ministers were instead part of the civil service ranks and not considered cabinet members, then they could continue in the posts even after the president's term had come to an end and his cabinet had been dissolved; a problem, given that the deputy minister post is often a political appointment.

The court said that if the president wanted to reappoint the current deputy ministers, he would have to issue a presidential decree without basing his decree on the annulled explanatory text.

The rest of the article, which is still valid, does allow Yudhoyono to appoint a deputy minister to shoulder some of the minister's responsibilities if deemed necessary.

The new presidential regulation, published on the website of the Cabinet Secretariat, setkab.go.id, thus replaces three previous presidential regulations on the appointment of deputy ministers, issued from 2009 to 2011, which were based on Article 10 of the state ministry law and its annulled explanatory section.

The new rule states that deputy ministers may be career civil servants or appointed from outside the bureaucracy. If appointees are the former, they will be temporarily discharged from their last positions while serving as deputy ministers, and may take back their old jobs when they are no longer deputy ministers.

Deputy ministers have no right to retirement funds nor severance pay when they no longer serve as deputy ministers, the new rule says.

"Deputy ministers are appointed and dismissed by the president. Their maximum term in office is the same as the president's, ending when the president's term ends," it adds in Article 4. (Antara/JG)