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)