Indonesia: Rights Key to New President’s Agenda http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/08/28/indonesia-rights-key-new-president-s-agenda
Religious Freedom, Military Accountability, Women’s Rights Among Issues for Action
AUGUST 28, 2014
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“As president, Widodo should reverse the failings of the previous
administration by giving priority to the human rights problems that have
gotten worse over the past decade. The new president needs to act
decisively to signal that his government will protect the rights of all
Indonesians and roll back the country’s culture of impunity.”
Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director
(New York) –
Indonesia’s
newly elected president, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, should focus efforts on
tackling the country’s persistent human rights problems, Human Rights
Watch said today in a
letter to the president-elect.
Human Rights Watch made specific recommendations on issues concerning
religious freedom, impunity of the security forces, women’s rights,
free expression, Papua, domestic workers, child migrants, corruption,
and indigenous land rights.
“As president, Widodo should reverse the failings of the previous
administration by giving priority to the human rights problems that have
gotten worse over the past decade,” said
Phelim Kine,
deputy Asia director. “The new president needs to act decisively to
signal that his government will protect the rights of all Indonesians
and roll back the country’s culture of impunity.”
Widodo inherits a number of serious human rights problems that
worsened during the decade-long administration of outgoing President
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The rising violence and discriminatory local
laws against religious minorities is of gravest concern. Widodo should
seek the revision of these discriminatory laws and ensure that
government officials who incite violence against religious minorities
are prosecuted.
There is still widespread impunity for members of the state security
forces for their involvement in serious human rights abuses. Widodo
should press for full investigations and prosecutions in key cases from
the Suharto period to the present, and urge parliament to revive a bill
that would provide civilian criminal court jurisdiction over military
personnel responsible for offenses against civilians.
In Papua, the failure of Indonesia’s security forces to distinguish
between violent acts and peaceful protests has contributed to rising
tensions and insecurity in the province. Human Rights Watch urged Widodo
to order the immediate and unconditional release of everyone imprisoned
for the peaceful exercise of their political views, and to permit
foreign journalists and human rights organizations unimpeded access to
the province.
In response to the deteriorating situation faced by women in
Indonesia, Widodo should eliminate all discriminatory bylaws against
women, and take stronger measures to address violence against women.
“Indonesia has all the ingredients to become a global model of an
emerging democracy that both respects human rights at home and actively
supports universal human rights standards internationally,” Kine said.
“But that requires President Widodo to take a firm stand to protect the
human rights of Indonesia’s marginalized groups, whether religious
minorities, domestic workers, or Papuans.”
–
http://www.hrw.org/node/128528
AUGUST 28, 2014
Dear President-elect Widodo,
Congratulations on your recent election. Human Rights Watch would like to wish you
selamat berjuang,
good luck, in carrying out your duties as president. We encourage you
in particular to bring energy to protecting and promoting human rights
in the country, and supporting renewed government initiatives.
Since the late 1980s, Human Rights Watch has worked on human rights
issues in Indonesia and provided input to the Indonesian government.
With your election victory, you and your new coalition government have
an opportunityand the responsibilityto address continuing human rights
concerns in Indonesia. As Indonesia is a party to the major human
rights treaties, we urge you to ensure that Indonesia lives up to its
international legal obligations.
We write to you with specific recommendations that have important
implications for the human rights of Indonesians, namely religious
freedom, lack of accountability for abuses by security forces, women’s
rights, freedom of expression, the situation in Papua, rights of child
migrants and asylum seekers, domestic workers, corruption, indigenous
land rights, and Indonesia’s role at the United Nations Human Rights
Council.
We urge you and your government to make these issues a priority. We
divided our recommendations on each subject into those which can have
near-immediate impact on the human rights situation of large numbers of
Indonesians, and those which will require longer-term commitment of
political will and capital.
Freedom of Religion
Indonesia, as the world’s most populous
Muslim nation, has a special role to play as a potential world leader on
religious freedom. That leadership role would benefit Indonesia and
expand its influence as a country that can successfully balance
religious diversity with protection of the rights of religious
minorities. Your administration has an opportunity and an obligation to
the Indonesian people to go beyond the previous government’s rhetorical
support for religious freedom by enforcing laws that protect religious
minorities and prosecuting groups and individuals who seek to deny that
right through threats and violence.
Over the last decade, the Indonesian government has often failed to
protect members of religious minorities from discrimination and
violence. The targets of that abuse include Ahmadis, Bahais, Christians,
Shia, and Sufi Muslims, as well as followers of native faiths. The 1965
blasphemy law as well as the 1969 and 2006 decrees on building houses
of worship often contributed to this violence. The blasphemy law
especially criminalizes the practice of religion that deviates from the
central tenets of Indonesia’s six officially “protected” religions.
According to the Setara Institute, a non-profit think tank monitoring
religious freedom, violent attacks motivated by religious intolerance
have increased from 91 cases in 2007 to 220 cases in 2013. The majority
of that violence has occurred in West Java, but incidents targeting
religious minorities have also occurred in Aceh, West Sumatra, East
Java, West Nusa Tenggara, Riau, Lampung, and South Sulawesi.
To address the problem of religious intolerance and related violence,
there are four measures that you can undertake shortly after assuming
office that will have immediate impact in terms of addressing abuses
against religious minorities. We urge your government to actively
investigate and prosecute attacks on religious minorities and bolster
protection of religious freedom by doing the following:
- Seek to amend or revoke regulations that discriminate against
religious minorities or exacerbate intolerance in Indonesia, including
the 1965 blasphemy law, the ministerial decrees on building houses of
worship, and the 2008 anti-Ahmadiyah decree.
- Take immediate disciplinary action against all government officials,
including cabinet members, governors, regents, and other officials who
make statements or engage in actions that promote religious
discrimination or condone violence.
- Seek criminal prosecution of government officials who incite violence against religious minorities.
- Enforce outstanding Supreme Court decisions authorizing the
construction of churches and other houses of worship including GKI
Yasmin and HKBP Filadelfia churches and sanction government officials
who refuse to permit the construction of houses of worship.
There are also a series of measures that your government can and
should do in the longer term to address the problem of religious
intolerance and related violence. We urge you to:
- Organize a national outreach on basic principles of religious
freedom and religious tolerance, including education programs
disseminated through government media and schools, and stronger policies
and responses to incitement to violence targeting religious minorities,
including greater clarity on when freedom of expression crosses the
line into incitement to violence.
- Review and restructure the functions of the Ministry of Religious
Affairs to ensure better representation for the hundreds of religions
and beliefs in Indonesia and the promotion of meaningful inter-faith
dialogue and inter-religious education.
- Ensure that Ahmadiyah and Shia who have been displaced from their
home villages by militant Islamists now living in temporary displacement
camps in East Java, Jakarta and West Nusa Tenggara, are allowed to
safely return to their homes.
Lack of Accountability for the Security Forces
We are encouraged that during your election
campaign, you committed to investigating the arrest, torture, and
enforced disappearance of pro-democracy activists by security forces,
including at the end of the Suharto regime.
However, there is still widespread impunity for members of the
security forces responsible for serious violations of human rights in
Indonesia.
While Indonesia has implemented significant reforms to the military
in recent years, members of Indonesia’s security forcesparticularly
Detachment 88 and Kopassus continue to engage in serious abuses. Human
Rights Watch research has revealed a pattern of arbitrary detention and
ill-treatmentparticularly in the two Papuan provincesand the failure
of military courts to investigate adequately or to prosecute alleged
serious human rights abuses by military personnel.
In the few military trials for which information is publicly
available, military prosecutors brought relatively insignificant
charges, and any sentences handed down by military judges have been
extremely lenient. For instance, in a 2010 case where soldiers tortured
two Papuans for three days in Tingginambut, some of which was captured
on film, a military tribunal convicted three soldiers, but sentenced
them to terms of only 8 to 10 months.
A bellwether test from the past decade is the case of Munir bin
Thalib, a respected human rights advocate murdered on a Garuda Indonesia
flight on September 4, 2004. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said at
that time that finding Munir’s murderer is “the test of our history.”
On December 31, 2008, a Jakarta court acquitted Maj. Gen. Muchdi
Purwopranjono, a former deputy in the State Intelligence Agency, of
Munir’s murder in a trial marred by witness coercion and intimidation.
On June 15, 2009, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by state
prosecutors of Muchdi’s acquittal.
Human Rights Watch understands the difficulties in investigating a
killing where there is strong evidence that state intelligence
authorities were involved. But there are serious concerns about events
in the lead-up to the trial and the quality of the evidence. Witnesses
were possibly intimidated into changing their statements, a key witness
fled the country, and the prosecution was weak.
Accountability for past abuses in Aceh continues to be elusive. Vice
President-elect Jusuf Kalla played a key role in negotiating an end to
the conflict in Aceh in 2005, but there is still no serious effort to
establish a tribunal to look at crimes committed after the agreement, as
required by the 2006 Law on Aceh Governance, or a truth and
reconciliation commission. The tribunal was supposed to be in operation
by August 31, 2007. Those involved in extrajudicial killings and other
serious abuses should be held to account to provide justice for the
victims and to deter future violations.
Besides these cases are the literally hundreds of thousands of other
victims of Suharto-era violence. Still unaddressed are the mass killings
of 1965-66, security force impunity for endemic violations in
counterinsurgency operations in East Timor, past crimes in Papua,
killings in Lampung, Tanjung Priok, and other prominent cases.
Indonesia has taken an important step by signing the International
Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance
in September 2010. Under the convention, Indonesia is obligated to
investigate alleged disappearances effectively, prosecute those
responsible, and provide a proper remedy for victims, including the
relatives of disappeared persons.
There are several measures that your government can undertake shortly
after taking office that will have immediate impact in addressing the
problem of impunity in Indonesia. We urge you to:
- Establish an independent and credible investigation of recent
allegations that members of the police, including members of Detachment
88, tortured suspected separatists in their custody.
- Implement parliament’s 2009 recommendation to open an investigation
into the emblematic case of the enforced disappearance of 13 students in
the late-1990s and provide compensation to the families of the
disappeared.
- Publish the report of a presidential fact-finding mission on Munir’s
murder. Order the National Police to provide the new evidence and ask
the Attorney General’s Office to immediately ask for a Supreme Court
review of the murder of Munir bin Thalib with strong measures to protect
witnesses.
- Order the Ministry of Home Affairs to fully support the Acehnese
bylaw on setting a truth and reconciliation commission in Aceh without
waiting for an establishment of a national commission.
- Urge parliament to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
There are also measures that your government can and should do in the
longer term to address the problem of lack of accountability for abuses
by the security forces. We urge you to:
- Ensure that those members of the Indonesian security forces
implicated in serious human rights violations, including those involving
command responsibility, are credibly and impartially investigated and
disciplined or prosecuted as appropriate.
- Revive a bill proposed in the House of Representatives that would
provide civilian criminal court jurisdiction over military personnel
responsible for offenses against civilians.
Women’s Rights
Indonesia has seen a rise in discriminatory
regulations against women, ranging from mandatory dress
codesespecially for civil servants and female studentsto limited
evening mobility unless accompanied by their
muhrimfathers,
brothers, spouses, or sons. Women civil servants and students who do not
follow these regulations face penalties including demotion and
expulsion.
The National Commission on Violence Against Women stated in August
2013 that there are 79 regencies where the hijab is mandatory. The
mandatory hijab is also imposed on Christian girls in some provinces
such as Aceh and West Sumatra. Local governments in Aceh enacted laws
that limit women’s freedom of expression and movement. In the city of
Lhokseumawe, a regulation bans women from straddling motorcycles. Bireun
regency has forbidden women from all dancing in public while Meulaboh
regency bans women from wearing pants.
Indonesia also needs to take additional measures to prevent and
respond to all forms of violence against women, including domestic
violence and female genital mutilation (FGM). The prevalence of FGM and
the consequences it has for women’s physical and mental health are
under-reported. FGM seriously impairs girl’s and women’s physical
integrity and subjects them to abuse of their rights to health, to be
free from violence, to life and physical integrity, to
non-discrimination, and to be free from cruel, inhuman, and degrading
treatment. It is not even clear whether the Health Ministry issued a
circular banning the practice of FGM.
We are encouraged that during the election campaign Vice
President-elect Kalla promised that if elected he would support a
government review of discriminatory bylaws in Indonesia, including the
mandatory hijab regulations. We urge you to:
- Direct the Ministry of Home Affairs to review and eliminate all
discriminatory bylaws against women in Indonesia, including ones
pertaining to mandatory dress regulations, the limitation of women’s
mobility, and freedom of expression, including dance.
- Direct the Ministry of Health to clarify that all forms of FGM are
banned and launch awareness campaigns about FGM; create a referral
system where women and girls can report and seek health services,
including mental health services; take disciplinary and other action
against licensed and other health workers who participate in such
procedures, and collect data on FGM to assist in its elimination.
There are also a series of other measures that your government can
and should do in the longer term to address abuses of women’s rights in
Indonesia. We urge you to:
- Press parliament to enact laws governing gender equality in
consultation with women’s rights groups and in accordance with
international human rights standards.
- Urge parliament to undertake criminal investigations and ensure
adequate redress for women from Aceh, the Moluccan Islands, Papua, and
Poso who suffered sexual violence from members of security forces and
armed groups during armed conflicts. Investigator should be well trained
to handle cases of sexual violence.
Freedom of Expression
Indonesia has a diverse and lively media,
but the right to freedom of expression has been undermined by the use of
criminal and civil defamation laws to silence criticism of the
government. Criminal defamation charges have been filed against
individuals after they held public demonstrations protesting corruption,
wrote letters to the editor complaining about fraud, registered formal
complaints with the authorities, published news reports about sensitive
subjects, and tweeted critical remarks about government officials.
The UN Human Rights Committee, the independent body of experts that
interprets the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR), has said that “defamation laws must be crafted with care to
ensure that they… do not serve, in practice, to stifle freedom of
expression. All such laws, in particular penal defamation laws, should
include such defenses as the defense of truth and they should not be
applied with regard to forms of expression that are not, of their
nature, subject to verification.” Criminal defamation laws have a
chilling effect on freedom of expression and work against the public
interest by deterring people from speaking out about corruption or other
misconduct by public officials.
Criminal defamation investigations and prosecutions can have a
dramatic impact on the lives of those accused. Some of those charged
with defamation lost their jobs. Others suffered professional setbacks
while they endured lengthy prosecutions, some of which lasted for years.
Some reported that their personal and professional relationships were
strained by the stigma of prosecution or conviction. Some were
imprisoned.
Offenses in Indonesia’s criminal code such as treason (
makar) and “inciting hatred” (
haatzai artikelen)
are used to suppress peaceful acts of free expression, including
demonstrations and acts of flag-rising in Papua and the Moluccas where
there are separatist movements. Criminal libel, slander, and “insult”
laws are also problematic, as they have been invoked against individuals
who have raised controversial issues concerning public officials.
There are two steps that you can undertake shortly after taking
office that will have immediate impact in addressing abuses of freedom
of expression in Indonesia. We urge you to:
- Release the dozens of political prisonersprimarily from Papua and
the Moluccan Islandsimprisoned for engaging in nonviolent
demonstrations, raising flags, and displaying pro-independence symbols.
- Call on public officials to refrain from filing criminal defamation
claims when the criticism against them relates to things they have done
or are alleged to have done in their official capacity.
There are also a series of other measures that your government should
do in the longer term to address abuses of freedom of expression. We
urge you to press parliament to:
- Amend the Law on Mass Organizations to eliminate those provisions
that restrict freedom of expression, religion, and rights of
association.
- Repeal criminal defamation laws, including provisions in the
Criminal Code and the Internet law that violate the internationally
recognized right to freedom of expression, replacing them with civil
defamation provisions that contain adequate safeguards to protect
freedom of expression from unnecessary limitations.
- Repeal laws that criminalize defamation and “insulting” public
officials, which Indonesian authorities have used to silence
anti-corruption activists, human rights defenders, and citizens who
publicly aired consumer complaints or allegations of misconduct.
Situation in Papua
Human Rights Watch recognizes that Papua
presents unique governance challenges for your government. The ongoing
low-level conflict with the small and poorly organized Free Papua
Movement (OPM) places responsibilities on the government to ensure
security for the population. However, the security forces are failing to
distinguish between violent acts and peaceful expression of political
views, which your government should protect. Although flag-raisings and
other peaceful expressions of pro-independence sentiment in Papua have
been denounced as treasonous, the government’s heavy-handed response to
these activities has resulted in numerous human rights violations. Your
administration has an obligation to keep the population safe while
respecting everyone’s basic rights.
Over the last three years alone, Human Rights Watch has documented
dozens of cases where police, military, intelligence officers, and
prison guards have used excessive force when dealing with Papuans
exercising their rights to peaceful assembly and association. The
government also frequently arrests and prosecutes Papuan protesters for
peacefully advocating independence or other political change. As of July
2014, 69 Papuan activists are imprisoned for “treason,” according to
the nongovernmental prisoner rights advocacy organization Papuan Behind
Bars.
The political prisoners include Filep Karma, a civil servant, who is
serving a 15-year prison sentence for raising the Morning Star flag a
West Papua independence symbol in December 2004. The United Nations
Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that Karma was not given a
fair trial in Indonesia and asked the Indonesian government to
immediately and unconditionally release him. Indonesia has rejected the
UN recommendation.
Human Rights Watch takes no position on the right to
self-determination, but we oppose imprisonment of individuals who
peacefully express support for self-determination.
Restrictions on access by foreign journalists and human rights
monitors to Papua exacerbate a climate where security forces can act
with impunity by keeping abuses out of the public eye and making
investigations more difficult. The government blocks international media
from freely reporting in Papua by limiting access to only those foreign
reporters who get special official permission to visit the area. The
government rarely approves such applications or indefinitely delays
their processing, hampering efforts by journalists and civil society
groups to report on breaking events. Two French reporters from
Franco-German Arte TV, detained in Papua since August 6, 2014 for
“illegal reporting,” are the most recent targets of Indonesia’s Papua
censorship obsession.
There are three measures that you can undertake shortly after taking
office that will have immediate impact in addressing the human rights
problems in Papua. We urge you to:
- End restrictions on access to Papua for independent observers,
including international journalists and human rights organizations, so
that they can visit Papua without need for specific permission or
approval.
- Comply with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary
Detention’s September 2, 2011 request for the immediate and
unconditional release of Filep Karma and other political prisoners in
Papua.
- Order the Indonesian military, including the Special Forces
(Kopassus), to cease the unlawful surveillance of peaceful activists,
politicians, and clergy immediately, and to ensure that civilian
authorities in Papua retain responsibility for basic law enforcement.
There are also a series of other measures that your government can
and should do in the longer term to address human rights abuses in
Papua. We urge you to:
- Review the 2007 Government Regulation No. 77, which bans the use of “separatist flags” in Papua, the Moluccas Islands, and Aceh.
- Order an independent and impartial investigation into various
allegations of human rights violations in Papua, including killings,
torture, arbitrary arrest, rape, and illegal detention. Such an
investigation should hold security forces accountable and bring the
perpetrators of such abuses to justice.
Domestic Workers
An estimated 2.6 million Indonesians,
including hundreds of thousands of girls, are employed as domestic
workers in other people’s households, performing tasks such as cooking,
cleaning, laundry, child care, and sometimes working at their employers’
businesses. Another estimated two million women migrate abroad as
domestic workers in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Middle East.
Within Indonesia, many domestic workers labor 14 to 18 hour days,
seven days a week, with no day off and make a fraction of the prevailing
minimum wage. Girls are at heightened risk of abuse. Many employers
forbid child domestic workers from leaving the house where they work,
isolate them from the outside world, and prohibit them from attending
school. In the worst cases, girls are physically, psychologically, and
sexually abused by their employers or their employers’ family members.
Indonesia’s labor law, the Manpower Act of 2003, excludes all
domestic workers from the basic labor rights afforded to formal workers,
such as a minimum wage, overtime pay, an eight-hour workday and 40-hour
workweek, weekly day of rest, and vacation. This has a discriminatory
impact on women and girls, who constitute the vast majority of domestic
workers. This exclusion in the law allows abuse to flourish in domestic
work, which is one of the most common sectors for forced labor and
trafficking.
Migrant domestic workers face the risk of abuse both at home and
abroad. Many prospective domestic workers do not receive accurate or
full information during the recruitment process and pay excessive fees
that leave them heavily indebted. Those who face abuse while abroad and
seek help from Indonesian embassies abroad may spend long periods in
overcrowded shelters with little hope of redress.
There are a series of measures that your government can and should do
in the longer term to address abuses of the rights of domestic workers,
particularly children and migrants. We urge you to:
- Pass a Domestic Workers Law that guarantees that domestic workers
receive the same rights as other workers, such as a written contract, a
minimum wage, overtime, a weekly day of rest, an eight-hour workday,
rest periods during the day, national holidays, vacation, paid sick
leave, workers compensation, and social security.
- Direct the Ministry of Manpower and provincial and district
governments to strictly enforce 15 as the minimum age of employment for
all sectors, including domestic work. Give priority to underage domestic
workers for removal and recovery assistance to help them return to
school and rebuild their lives.
- Ensure that police have the commitment and resources necessary to
comply with their obligations under the Domestic Violence Act, in
particular to provide temporary protection to a victim within 24 hours
of knowing or receiving a report of violence in the household.
- Improve regulation and oversight of the recruitment process for
migrant domestic workers, including through cooperation with
migrant-receiving countries, unannounced inspections, and the
prohibition of recruitment fees to workers.
- Ratify the 2011 International Labor Organization Convention
Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers and consult with social
partners on designing effective implementation strategies.
Rights of Asylum Seekers and Child Migrants
Indonesia unnecessarily detains and fails
to protect the rights of migrants and asylum-seekers, including
children, en-route to Australia.
Migrants and asylum seekers arrive in Indonesia after fleeing
persecution, violence, and poverty in Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Burma, and elsewhere and are subject to detention. Indonesia does not
provide asylum seekers and migrants a way to challenge their detention.
Indonesian law permits up to 10 years of immigration detention.
Each year, hundreds of child migrants are detained in abysmal
conditions, without access to lawyers, and sometimes beaten. Others are
left to fend for themselves, without any assistance with food or
shelter. Unaccompanied migrant childrenwho travel without parents or
other adults to protect themfall into a legal void. With no government
agency responsible for their guardianship, no one responds to their
needs. Some children languish in detention, while others are left on the
streets.
There is one measure that you can undertake shortly after taking
office that will have immediate impact in addressing abuses of the
rights of child migrants and asylum seekers. We urge you to:
- Direct the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, which oversees
immigration offices, to stop detaining unaccompanied migrant children
and provide them safe and open accommodations.
There are also longer term measures that we urge you to undertake to
improve the rights of all asylum seekers and migrants. We urge you to:
- Urge parliament to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967
Protocol and implement their provisions by enacting legislation that
conforms to international standards by providing a fair and timely
asylum process.
- Issue clear standards for immigration detention facilities, provide
training for staff that ensures the protection of the rights and safety
of all detainees, and promptly investigate allegations of misconduct to
ensure that violence, ill-treatment, and corruption do not occur in
migrant detention centers.
- Bring migrant detention center conditions up to international
standards relating to overcrowding, water and sanitation, nutrition, and
access to recreation, among others.
Corruption
Anti-corruption measures are critical to
ensuring that human rights protections are enjoyed by all Indonesians.
We commend the progress made by the Anti-Corruption Commission (Komisi
Pemberantasan Korupsi), particularly in its recent efforts to coordinate
reform in the forest sector, but it is not enough. Sustained, rigorous
efforts to root out corruption in the police, judiciary, and military
will help stem the loss of tax revenues from lucrative natural
resources, especially the forestry and plantation sectors. Strong
leadership from yourself and the Ministry of Forestry is needed to
implement anti-corruption reforms, such as mechanisms to ensure the
legal origin of wood products and the full payment of forestry taxes.
There are also a series of measures that your government should take
in the longer term to address abuses related to corruption. We urge you
to:
- Ensure corruption investigations sufficiently extend to the
military, including the use of anti-corruption and money laundering
legislation to fight corruption in the forestry and other natural
resource sectors.
- Fully implement and enforce the Freedom of Information Act, among
other things so that citizens and civil society organizations can play a
more active role in supporting anti-corruption work.
- Amend the timber verification system to include assessment of
government and company compliance with laws protecting local land rights
and compensation agreements. Timber legality certificates should be
withheld until civil society monitors have received all necessary
information to conduct oversight and their complaints have been
addressed by the auditors.
- Provide clear support for the Anti-Corruption Commission’s work on natural resource sector reform.
- Extend the mandate and provide clear support for the Presidential
Delivery Unit on Development (UKP4), in particular its work on
bureaucratic reform for transparency and anti-corruption.
Indigenous Land Rights
Mismanagement and corruption associated
with forestry and agricultural concessions fuel land conflicts,
sometimes violent, between companies and local communities. Government
authorities have routinely violated the rights of forest-dependent
communities in allocating land use and granting natural resource
companies extraction rights. However, a landmark 2013 constitutional
court ruling found inclusion of customary territories within state
forests to be unconstitutional. This ruling represents a significant and
laudable shift toward the correction of decades of injustice. However,
this ruling’s implementation requires the government to map and register
these lands and negotiate their removal from existing concessions.
There is one measure that you can undertake after taking office that
will have immediate impact in addressing human rights abuses related to
indigenous land rights. We urge you to:
- Issue a Presidential Instruction to implement the May 2013
constitutional court decision on excluding traditional territories from
state forest and industrial concessions. It should include clear
instructions for reforming customary land registration procedures to
ensure transparency and participation of communities and civil society
observers, and create a functional grievance mechanism accessible to the
rural poor for resolution of individual land claims.
There are also other measures that your government should take in the
longer term to address abuses of the rights of indigenous people and
stem the rising tide of land conflicts and rural violence. We urge you
to:
- Extend the mandate and provide clear support for the “One Map
Initiative” to address the overlapping claims between natural resource
companies and indigenous communities, as well as the Anti-Corruption
Commission’s forest sector reform efforts.
- Provide leadership and support for the passage of the Indigenous
People’s Bill, and for interagency coordination of mapping and
recognition of indigenous land rights.
UN Human Rights Council
Indonesia was one of the 47 founding
members of the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council and has announced it
would run for a new term for 2015 – 2017. Prior to 2011, Indonesia
systematically voted against all country-specific resolutions put to
vote in the Council, with the exception of all the resolutions focusing
on the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab
territories. Since August 2011, Indonesia has modified its approach to
the Human Rights Council by abstaining on most of the country specific
resolutions presented for adoption to the Council, and supported the
Council’s action on the grave human rights violations committed in
Syria.
As a major player at the Human Rights Council, Indonesia engaged on
many of the Council’s debates on country-specific situations, but
advocated for weakening language on violations and strengthening
language on progress in these countries. In order to fully fulfill the
mandate of the UN Human Rights Council to “address situations of
violations of human rights, including gross and systematic violations,
and make recommendations thereon” and to “respond promptly to human
rights emergencies,” Indonesia should not use its regional leadership to
shield countries from criticism on well-documented human rights
concerns, but rather use the Council’s country-specific debates to press
them to engage in much needed reforms. We urge your government to:
- Direct the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to commit fully to implement
the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate, including addressing and
preventing situations of rights violations and responding promptly to
emergencies.
- Base Indonesia’s positions on an objective assessment of the needs
of victims on the ground, the international obligations of the
government concerned, the actual access or lack of access into areas
where human rights violations occur, and the actual commitment or lack
of commitment of the government concerned to remedy past and prevent
future atrocities.
- Ensure that Indonesia’s positions are consistent with international
human rights law and international humanitarian law and commit to use
the expertise of treaty bodies, the Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights and special procedures of the Human Rights Council in this
regard.
- Consider supporting Council action on new situations of violations whenever new crises occur.
Thank you for your consideration. We would appreciate the opportunity
to discuss these and other human rights issues with you and members of
your administration.
Sincerely,
Brad Adams
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