Jakarta, Ekuatorial – Indonesian Forum for the Environment or Walhi filed a judicial review on Aceh’s spatial planning law to the Supreme Court, on Thursday (9/10), in Jakarta.
“We have filed [the judicial review] to the Supreme Court at 11am. It is an effort to save Aceh’s environment from massive extractive development and destructive investment,” said Muhnur Satyahaprabu, Policy and Law Advocacy Manager of Walhi, in Jakarta.
Furthermore, Satyahaprabu said that the 2013 Regional Aceh Law on Spatial Planning was issued without proper procedure, especially excluding people’s participation.
“There were 27 points from the Ministry of Home Affairs to include several things, such as public participation, spatial planning, and environmental management but none of them were depicted in the law,” he said. “We think that Aceh government was too rashly to issue this regulation that we fear there’s a vested interest before the end of their terms.”
Based on Walhi record, the regional law had violated 21 regulations, — ten Laws (UU), four Government Regulation (PP), one Presidential Decree (Perpres), one Presidential Decision (Kepres), two Ministry of Home Affairs Regulation (Permendagri), one Ministry of Forestry Regulation (Permenhut), and two Ministry of Public Works Regulation (PermenPU) –.
In addition, the regulation did not include Leuser Ecosystem as its nomenclature. “This is very fatal because then Leuser ecocystem will be excluded from the spatial planning meanwhile central government had already regulated on it,” he said.
Muhammad Nur, director of Aceh chapter of Walhi, said that the Law had opened more opportunities for extractive industries to exploit more on the province’s resources.
“In this new spatial planning, there’s a decreasing forest cover of 145,982 hectares, including protected forest and conservation areas turned into other land uses of 79,179 hectares,” Nur said.
He said that the law potentially increase land conflicts, ecological disasters especially flash floods, due to the poor land management.
“From the revenue, we discovered that the government is losing at lot of money because of ecological disasters, for instance flash floods can cause one billion rupiah,” he said. “This law has also abandoned customary forests. Of all maps issued by Aceh government, there’s not one district proposed indigenous people in its spatial planning.”
Satyahapurba said that the Supreme Court trials would take a minimum of ten months. Januar Hakam