Saturday, January 17, 2015

1) 40 people found infected with HIV in Jayapura

1) 40 people found infected with HIV in Jayapura
2) Fiji opposition announces support for West Papua

3) UN presses Indonesia on  human rights progress  report 

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http://www.antaranews.com/en/news/97401/40-people-found-infected-with-hiv-in-jayapura

1) 40 people found infected with HIV in Jayapura

Sabtu, 17 Januari 2015 15:48 WIB | 338 Views
Jayapura, Papua (ANTARA News) - At least 40 people were found to have been infected by HIV in the city of Jayapura, the capital of Papua until November in 2014.

Head of the Reproduction Health Center of Jayapura Toma Heppy said here on Saturday the HIV carriers are treated only as outpatients with regular control.

"But AIDs carriers have to be sent to the Abepura state hospital for more intensive treatment," Toma said.

He said most of the 40 people known to have been infected by HIV were women.

"There are few men coming for the test," he said, adding every month more than 300 people including children coming for the test.

Earlier, the Southeast Sulawesi Health service said the number of the HIV/AIDs carriers in that province grew in 2014 from the previous year.

Head of the regional health service Asrun Tombili said the number of people infected by the fatal disease in the province reached 158 in the first 10 months of 2014 as against only 103 in the whole of 2013.
(Uu.H-ASG/F001)

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http://www.radionz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/263888/fiji-opposition-announces-support-for-west-papua


2) Fiji opposition announces support for West Papua

Updated at 8:13 pm on 17 January 2015

Fiji's opposition parties have rallied behind the Free West Papua Movement in a move they hope will put pressure on authorities to act.
The Opposition leader, Ro Teimumu Kepa, says the Melanesian people of West Papua have been terrorised for years and hopes for freedom have been suppressed.
The Fiji Times reports the opposition is hoping authorities will be pressured to hold the Indonesian government to account for human rights abuses in the restive province.

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http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/01/17/un-presses-indonesia-human-rights-progress-report.html
3) UN presses Indonesia on  human rights progress  report 
Hans Nicholas Jong, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | National | Sat, January 17 2015, 11:29 AM 

The United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHR Committee) has demanded that the Indonesian government fulfill its promise of submitting a long-overdue report on the state of the country’s human rights.


Indonesia should have submitted the report before a July 2014 deadline.

UNHR Committee member and special rapporteur for Indonesia, Cornelis Flinterman, said on Friday that Indonesia must submit the report as a follow-up to a UN review session in Geneva in July 2013.

During the review session, members of the UNHR Committee questioned Indonesia’s commitment to resolving human rights abuses, protecting religious minorities and curbing the use of excessive force, after which the UNHR Committee issued a list of recommendations for the government to act upon.

“We adopted 26 concerns and identify four which require immediate attention from the government. Then the government was required to submit a follow-up report [on the four recommendations] by July 2014. Regrettably, the committee has not received any report,” Flinterman told a press conference in Kuningan, South Jakarta, on Friday.

As the Indonesian government had not made any follow-up report on the recommendations, two UNHR Committee members flew to Jakarta earlier this week to talk with members of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s administration.

On Wednesday and Thursday, the UNHR Committee, facilitated by Human Rights Watch Group (HRWG) and the Center for Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), met officials from some government institutions, including the Law and Human Rights Ministry, the Religious Affairs Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the Home Ministry.

“The experience that we had is that the issues are being discussed in a serious manner and we hope the response from the government will come soon,” Flinterman said.

During the meeting, the Foreign Ministry revealed that the government was caught up in other human rights issues in 2014, which also happened to be an election year, he said.

“That made it impossible for the government to comply [with the report deadline],” Flinterman said.

The four urgent recommendations from the UNHR Committee are the abolition of the death penalty, the repeal of Law No. 1/1965 on defamation of religion, the abolition of female genital mutilation practices and the prosecution of cases involving past human rights violations, including the murder of prominent human rights activist Munir Said Thalib in 2004.

From these four recommendations, only the practice of female genital mutilation had been abolished with the repeal of the Health Ministry’s regulation No. 1636/2010 that authorized the performance of female genital mutilation by medical practitioners.

“That’s a positive development. But there are also some regressions, such as the death penalty, and 
some issues that are stagnant,” UNHR Committee member Victor Manuel Rodrigues-Rescia told The Jakarta Post.

In December 2014, President Jokowi said that he would reject requests for clemency for 64 drug traffickers who are currently on death row, something that Rodrigues-Rescia believed to be wrong as he said drug trafficking should not be considered a crime for which the death penalty could be justified.

As for the stagnant human rights issues, Rodrigues-Rescia cited past human rights cases that the government had failed to act upon so far.

The government also still had a lot of work to do in eradicating discrimination against minorities in the country, he said.

Rodrigues-Rescia gave an example of how fatwa or edicts issued by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) could sometimes be used as a basis for discrimination.

The latest legal edict issued by the MUI was late last year on homosexual acts, which the fatwa considered a sexual crime.

“Any kind of fatwa that leads to discrimination or persecution is unacceptable. When a religion criticizes or condemns a person because of his or her sexual orientation, then there’s discrimination according to human rights,” Rodrigues-Rescia said.

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