Jakarta City Guide - Indonesian News

The House of Representatives' legislation committee has been accused of curbing efforts to adopt a UN anti-tobacco convention aimed at reducing global consumption of tobacco for its negative impacts on health. The Indonesian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (IFPPD) said its attempts to include a draft law on tobacco control in the national legislation program had three times been rejected by the committee. The legislation committee chairman said the bill was "not urgent" for discussion, IFPPD executive director Sri Utari Setyawati said at a press conference here Friday. The rejections came despite the fact that at least 259 legislators had signed in support of the deliberation of the new bill proposed by her forum in 2005 which adopted its main content from the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), she said. "We first submitted the draft to the legislation committee in February 2006, but this was too late for the 2006 national legislation program. We then submitted in mid 2006 for the 2007 legislation program, but this was not included in the program either." "By mid 2007, we had again submitted a draft for the 2008 legislation program, but it was still to no avail. The last thing the legislation committee chairman said was that the draft was not urgent," Sri said. The FCTC was opened for endorsement in Geneva in 2003 and at the United Nations' headquarters in New York in 2004. The treaty (now closed to further signatures) has 168 signatories, including the European Community, making it the most widely embraced treaty in UN history. Indonesia is among 36 countries worldwide, and the only country in Southeast Asia, which was yet to ratify the UN convention. Other non-party countries include the United States, Argentina, Italy, Switzerland, Somalia, Afghanistan and Mozambique. Recently, the Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI)