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Women urge pressure for more seats
Jakarta Post - March 2, 2009
Adianto P. Simamora, Jakarta – Women's activists and legislators have vowed not to stop fighting for more seats in legislative bodies, after failing to win a legal basis to support their move.
They plan to stage a massive series of rallies later this week to pressure the government to ensure more legislative seats for women during the April 9 legislative elections.
The rallies will be held across the country on March 8 to coincide with International Women's Day, and to respond to the government's refusal to issue a regulation-in-lieu-of-law (perpu) on affirmative action for female politicians.
"The government's failure to issue such a perpu is bad news for our democracy. It shows the government is paying no attention to increasing legislative seats for women," Hulfa, national coordinator of the Caucus for Young Indonesian Women Politicians, told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.
On Thursday, the government issued a long-awaited regulation-in-lieu-of-law on ballot marking and updating the permanent voter list. However, it rejected issuing such a ruling on a seat quota for women.
Similarly, the General Elections Commission (KPU) has decided to comply with a recent ruling by the Constitutional Court that legislative seats be granted to candidates who win the most votes in elections.
Hulfa said the planned rallies would be attended by thousands of people, including from the Indonesian Women's Coalition, the Indonesian Women's Association for Justice (LBH-APIK), Karya Mitra, the Political Alliance (Ansipol) and a Catholic women's group. "We also invite all female legislative candidates from the 38 parties to join the rallies," she said.
There are about 12,000 legislative candidates, 34 percent of them women, vying for 560 seats at the House of Representatives.
Hulfa said women's groups would also push political parties to issue internal policies to give women more seats. "We will send letters to parties asking them to award all votes for parties to women to increase their representation at the House," she said.
In Jakarta, protesters plan to march on the Constitutional Court and the Presidential Palace. "We want to protest the court for its ruling because it has destroyed all our efforts to campaign for more seats for women in legislative bodies," said Indonesian Women's Coalition chairwoman Masruchah.
The court's decision to scrap Article 214 of the 2008 Legislative Elections Law – which allowed parties to determine their representatives in legislative bodies based on a hierarchical system of seat distribution, rather than directly giving seats to candidates winning the most votes – was deemed a huge blow to female candidates.
Women's activists said the ruling effectively wiped out their chances of winning seats due to their lack of political exposure and poor financial support. "We still hope the government has the political will to issue a perppu on this matter this month," Masruchah said.
She accused the government of discriminating against women in politics, despite Indonesia having ratified the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against the Women in 1984.
The highest occurrence of women at the House was during the 1987-1992 period, when women occupied 13 percent or 65 seats, before dipping to 9 percent in the 1999-2004 period. Campaigners have long sought a ruling to ensure a minimum 30 percent of legislative representatives are women.
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