Legal experts debating changes on birth citizenship

Fitri Wulandari, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Legal experts are currently debating a change to the 1958 Law on Citizenship which would allow a child born in Indonesia to obtain citizenship regardless of the parents' nationality.

A working committee, comprised of legal experts and members of the National Commission on Human Rights, is proposing the principle of jus soli, which determines citizenship by place of birth, be applied as the primary consideration.

The changes, which committee members said would be submitted to the House of Representatives as an alternative to a draft drawn up at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, would effectively combine jus soli with the currently applied principle of jus sanguinis which determines citizenship based on the parents' nationality.

The current law stipulates that a child born in Indonesia will have the citizenship of the father who was legally wed to the mother.

However, a child is not accorded Indonesian citizenship if the father is a foreigner, regardless of the fact that the mother may be an Indonesian citizen.

The only exceptions are when the child has an Indonesian mother but no legal bonds with the father or when the legal father has no citizenship.

Another special case would be if the child is born here from unknown parents.

The law often adversely affects Indonesian mothers who, for example due to immigrations complications faced by their foreign spouse, have had their child deported out of the country along with the husband.

"Inter-nationality marriages often cause abandoned children," committee member Suma Mihardja told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

"We're concerned about a possible drastic increase in these cases in the future," added Suma from the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute.

Under the draft law the only exception to obtaining automatic citizenship at birth is if the parents were, at the time of the child's birth, stationed in Indonesia on a diplomatic mission.

The working committee was established a year ago in a drive to eradicate what are perceived as discriminating laws. It gained momentum particularly with the news that the government at last had decided to begin considering changes to Law No. 62/1958.

The core of the committee is comprised of members from three major groups -- the Human Rights Commission, the Anti- Discrimination Movement, and the National Unity Communication Forum.

However, members of the committee did not say when their draft would be submitted to the House, saying further fine-tuning would be required.

The current draft being debated at the Ministry of Justice still adheres to a jus sanguinis principle with reliance on the citizenship of the father as the primary consideration.

On the question of a child of Indonesian parentage born abroad and being accorded citizenship of the country of birth, the working committee proposed that the child be allowed to maintain dual citizenship.

The child, upon reaching 18 years of age, may declare the citizenship to the country of choice.

However there were no major changes by the committee on the question of not recognizing dual citizenship for adults.

Meanwhile the only major proposed change with regard to the requirements of foreigners obtaining citizenship, is the lowering of the minimum age of an applicant from 21 to 18.

Applicants accepted for citizenship here will automatically lose their previous citizenship, if they had one.

The committee also underscored the waiver for Indonesians of foreign descent here who were previously required to show official papers on evidence of citizenship (SBKRI).

Senior government officials concede that lower ranking bureaucrats and even some in the private sector continue to request such papers when dealing with Indonesians of Chinese, Arab or Indian descent, despite the abolition of such a requirement in a 1996 Presidential Decree.

The committee stressed that local identity cards or birth certificates should suffice.

The remarks were made as ethnic Chinese were often exploited in such matters, committee member and lawyer Frans Hendra Winarta said.

"There is a reluctance among bureaucrats to exercise such laws as it is a profitable source of corruption," he said on Wednesday during a discussion to publicize the committee's draft law.

With the advent of the reform era and the relaxing of restrictions against ethnic Chinese, the government has pledged to expedite citizenship applications for those here.

Last year the government said it was in the process of granting citizenship to nearly 140,000 stateless ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.

Allegations of institutionalized discrimination against ethnic Chinese however, persist.

Recently the Chinese-Indonesian Association (INTI) said that no less than 60 laws and regulations were discriminatory to certain ethnic groups, religions or beliefs. These include some dating back to 1849 and others as recent as 1988.