Rights body reviews UN pact on civil rights
Rights body reviews UN pact on civil rights
JAKARTA (JP): The National Human Rights Commission is currently studying the 1966 International Covenant on Civilian and Political Rights before calling for ratification by the government.
"Miriam Budiardjo is studying the covenant," commission member Nurcholish Madjid said yesterday. "We will then propose it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for ratification," he said after speaking at a discussion on human rights.
Another Commission member who addressed the one-day forum, B.N. Marbun, said Indonesia's human rights record is often criticized because it has not yet ratified a number of international conventions.
"Charges from Indonesian and foreign human rights activists are raised because Indonesia seems to have shut itself off from international human rights development due to the several conventions which we have not ratified," Marbun said.
The discussion entitled "Indonesia and the West: An International Dialog on Human Rights" was organized by the Association of Indonesian Moslem Intellectuals (ICMI), the Goethe Institut and the World Trade Center.
A participant from Australia asked why Indonesia has not ratified the 1966 covenant, a revision of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. The covenant dropped a paragraph on the contentious right of changing religions.
Nurcholish said the covenant is "good" and denied that there may be concerns that ratification would lead to the impression that Indonesia is adopting a western framework of human rights.
"We believe that human rights is universal, and there is still room for interpretation in cultural relativism," he said.
The human rights commission, he said, aims for the ratification of international conventions "as much as possible".
The Commission, set up in 1993, has a sub-commission to study international conventions which Indonesia has not ratified.
Marbun and two German scholars said in their papers that human rights is universal, but implementation needs to take into account local religious and cultural factors.
One reason why the human rights commission has proved acceptable to many parties is its "appeal to humanism" in approaching conflicting parties. "We do not seek scapegoats, but aim to find a way out and prioritize deliberation towards consensus," he said.
Winfried Brugger, who teaches philosophy of law at the University of Heidelberg, said because culture is a person's second nature, "... cultural relativism ... entails a degree of truth. There should be room both for a variety of regional human rights instruments, and for different ways of balancing individual rights against legitimate interests of the community."
Universalism of human rights can be preserved by referring to what he called the "five elements of the image of the person".
Juliane Kokott of the University of Dusseldorf said "the implementation of universal human rights in Islamic or Asian countries needs to consider the different economic and cultural conditions".
"That Islamic countries have a comparably low record as to ratification of universal human rights instruments must not be attributed exclusively to Islam," Kokott said.
"Rather, poverty and underdevelopment, which prevail in many Islamic countries, render compliance with human rights particularly difficult," she said.
Nurcholish said because human rights is rooted in Islam, "it is a challenge for Moslems to practice their religion; don't let outsiders think Islam is anti-human rights." (anr)