Ministry of Human Rights urges regional regulations to adopt human rights perspective from drafting stage

Jakarta (ANTARA) - Acting Director General of Instruments and Strengthening of Human Rights at the Ministry of Human Rights, Sofia Alatas, is urging regional governments to draft local regulations with a human rights perspective from the design stage to prevent the emergence of policies that could potentially violate the rights of the public. Sofia has therefore requested the Ministry’s Regional Offices to actively provide assistance to their partner local governments. “Because with your assistance, the formation of new policies will already incorporate human rights aspects,” Sofia said at the opening of a consignment activity on Assistance for the Analysis and Evaluation of Draft Legislation and Legislation from a Human Rights Perspective in Jakarta on Monday. She stated that government policy forms the basis for implementing various programmes, so human rights aspects must be an inseparable part of the drafting process. Sofia expressed hope that the involvement of the Ministry’s Regional Offices from the initial stage of drafting local regulations would eliminate the need for tasks that merely evaluate existing policies. “Going forward, we should not only be analysing existing policies as evaluation material, but also providing assistance to our partners in the regions so that future evaluations of this kind are no longer necessary,” she said. Sofia noted that policies lacking a human rights perspective could trigger public complaints because the primary element of such grievances is often the policy itself. One of the Ministry’s efforts to encourage the drafting of human rights-oriented local regulations is conducting technical guidance for regional offices to strengthen officials’ capacity in assisting the drafting and analysis of regional legal products from a human rights perspective. Through this training, Ministry officials will be equipped with knowledge on the fundamentals of human rights, techniques for analysing regional legal products, and assessment methods for both draft and existing regulations, ensuring that resulting recommendations can serve as material for policy improvement in the regions.