Outdated laws hinder marital bliss
Outdated laws hinder marital bliss
M. Taufiqurrahman
The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
After a brief romance in early January 2004, a Balinese man
tied the knot with a European woman in Canada and the union was
duly recorded by the local civil registry.
The European woman decided to embrace her husband's Hindu
faith to avoid possible legal complications when they returned to
his home country.
The newlyweds arrived in Indonesia with the intention of
registering their marriage with the Buleleng civil registration
office, but was surprised and upset when the office recorded
their marriage as between an Indonesian man and a Chinese woman.
The designation as Chinese entails a legal quagmire for the
couple's future children. The children will be vulnerable to
discrimination and will be subject to extortion when trying to
obtain citizenship documents, a common problem befalling Chinese-
Indonesians.
In another case, when an Indonesian woman married a foreigner,
instead of registering it as a union between people of different
nationalities, a local civil registration office recorded it as a
marriage between an Indonesian woman and a foreign man. As the
law stands, the couple's future children will be regarded
automatically as having the same nationality as their father, and
will thus have to undergo immigration hassles to legalize their
residency here.
The above two cases illustrate the woes facing men and women
of different nationalities or faiths who unwittingly "defied" the
country's outdated laws to start up a family.
In both cases, according to a survey by the Antidiscrimination
Struggle Movement (Gandi), the two couples were registered based
on existing regulations left over from the Dutch colonial period,
which classify citizens into three categories: European, Chinese
and native.
At present, 15 laws and government regulations on civil
registration date back to the colonial era, when citizens were
grouped according to religious belief, race and other social
categories.
The most notorious of the regulations is Law No. 1/1974 on
matrimony, which states that a marriage is legal only when the
union is between couples of the same religion.
As a result, a foreign man who decides to marry an Indonesian
woman -- or vice versa -- must follow one of the five religions
officially recognized by the Indonesian government: Buddhism,
Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam or Protestantism.
An Indonesian couple who adheres to two different faiths must
either get married under one religion -- at least on paper -- and
continue to practice their respective faiths, or go abroad to wed
and register their union with the appropriate local registry upon
their return.
That a couple of different faiths can get married abroad and
register their marriage locally only highlights the inefficiency
and impracticality of the regulation on interfaith marriage.
The notorious Marital Law, however, is unlikely to be retained
in its current state, as an amendment is included as one among
several priority bills to be deliberated by the House of
Representatives soon.
Lawmaker and women's rights activist Nursjahbani Katjasungkana
said the proposed amendment sought to mend the existing law on
matrimony, which she decried as discriminatory.
"The proposed amendment seeks to provide a clear-cut
foundation for interfaith or intercultural marriages, or to
determine whether or not such unions are in need of regulation
from the government at all," Katjasungkana told The Jakarta Post.
She said the law required that all marriages be registered
with the country's civil administration system, regardless of the
a couple's religious or cultural backgrounds.
Changing the law, however, was only part of the solution,
Gandi chairman Wahyu Effendi said.
"Amending the law is one thing, but changing the perspective
of government officials who implement the law is another. Even if
the amended law gives the go-ahead for intercultural or
interfaith marriages, change will come slowly, as the officials
are used to the old discriminatory practices," he told the Post.