Outdated laws inhibit marital bliss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illustrate the woes facing men and women of different nationalities or faiths who unwittingly "defied" the country's outdated laws to start up a family.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.