JAKARTA — Fear among Indonesia’s ruling class of losing control of natural resources to Indigenous people is why the country’s parliament continues to delay passing a long-awaited bill on Indigenous rights, according to activists. The bill was proposed in 2012 and has been placed on parliament’s list of national priority legislation every year since 2014, but never passed since. A lawmaker on the legislation committee discussing the bill now says that’s because it keeps being blocked by two of the biggest parties in parliament. Luluk Nur Hamidah said her committee had as early as 2020 submitted a final draft of the bill to the parliamentary speaker, Puan Maharani, but that the latter had since done nothing about it. As speaker, Puan — a member of the PDI-P, the biggest party in parliament and the main party in the ruling coalition — was supposed to bring the bill to a plenary session of parliament for a vote. If passed, parliament would then notify the administration of President Joko Widodo, also a PDI-P member, which would have an opportunity to identify specific problems to be resolved in the draft legislation. This list of problems is known as a “problem inventory list,” or DIM by its Indonesian acronym. The next step would be for parliament to discuss the DIM with the government to resolve any outstanding issues, before passing the bill into law. But none of that has happened, with Puan refusing to move the bill from committee level to the wider plenary,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Pro-business parties accused of holding back Indonesia’s Indigenous rights bill first appeared on EnviroLink Network.