Time to have decree on illegitimate children
Time to have decree on illegitimate children
JAKARTA (JP): A governmental decree on the status of a child
born out of a wedlock is needed due to the increasing number of
such cases in modern day life, an official of the Ministry of
Religious Affairs says.
Director for Islamic Affairs Ichtianto said recently that "in
this age of globalization, now is the 'right moment' to issue
such a decree", Antara reported.
Article 43 of the 1974 Marital Law stipulates that an
illegitimate child has only a "civil relationship" with the
mother and her family, leaving the child's true legal status "to
be settled in a governmental decree".
Such a decree has not been formulated.
According to Herusuko from the Jakarta Civil Registry Office,
the law narrowly defines an illegitimate child as one born out of
an illegal marriage.
Such a status, he said, could be the result of an unmarried
couple cohabitating, a case where one or both parents are still
committed to another marriage or in a case where the child is the
product of an incident of rape or prostitution.
Other possible cases include: when the child is conceived by a
mother who is still in a "waiting period" after a divorce or the
death of her husband, when the child is born by a mother who is
still in the process of getting a divorce, or when the wife is
abandoned by her husband for more than 300 days and the child
not recognized by the father as his.
Under Islamic law, a widow or divorcee has to wait for 100
days before she is allowed to remarry.
Other instances, Herusuko said, include when the child is born
to parents who, due to religious laws, were not allowed marry, or
by parents who, due to civil laws, cannot marry (such as in the
case of a foreigner and an Indonesian who are not allowed a
marriage permit because of prior marriage commitments in their
respective countries).
An illegitimate child in Indonesia can be one who has gone
unrecorded in the state's civil records, though this is
considered legal from a religious point of view, or one whose
parents are unknown. If the marriage is not conducted according
to teachings of any of the officially recognized religions in
Indonesia, this is also considered grounds for illegitimacy.
Junior Attorney General H. Taufik was quoted by Antara as
saying that the "civil relationship" stipulated in Article 43 of
the Marital Law means that the illegitimate child's rights and
obligations will go to the mother or the mother's family, and
will have no link with the father's side.
Taufik pointed out that the regulations conform to many
traditional and Islamic rules on marriage, which stipulate that a
child may only have one true mother.
The law on marriage stipulates that the government will
legalize a marriage between people of different religions upon
recognition of the marriage by any institution representing one
of the two religions in question.
The marriage law has been criticized as being "legally
defective" in the past and some consider it ambiguous and
difficult to enforce.
Former Minister of Religious Affairs Munawir Sjadzali once
complained that due to its heterogeneous society, Indonesia was
bound to have mixed marriages and that the complicated
bureaucratic problems in dealing with couples of different
religions would easily lead them to illegal cohabitation.
So far, for the sake of the law, many people have changed
their religions to gain the government's recognition of their
marriages. Others get married overseas in the hope of gaining
government approval afterwards. (pwn)