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Indonesian Environment Agency, Swiss NGO Seek Legal Fix to Help Snub Out Smoking
Ulma Haryanto | January 21, 2010

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Leslie_Williams
8:47am Jan 22, 2010

One expects when driving anywhere in Jakarta to see almost every driver of a Bajai or Public Bus with a cigarette hanging from their lips, but you don't expect to find anti-smoking regulations being blatantly violated in a place like Mal Taman Anggrek (which I am sure is not alone in this). Here there are a number of Restaurants/Coffee Shops where smokers are not in a dedicated "smoking room" but in a "smoking area" immediately adjacent to tables in the "non-smoking area". The worst example is in "Dapur Anggrek" the Mal's Food Court, where smoking is allowed at one end and immediately adjacent to counters selling food. Surely this must be in contravention of Food Safety Regulations as well as being a breach of anti-smoking regulations. Do the managements of Taman Anggrek and other Shopping Malls which condone these practices feel that they are perhaps "above the law"?


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ASwiss nonprofit is was working with Jakarta’s Environmental Management Agency to revise anti-smoking legislation to help make the capital’s public places smoke-free by 2011.

“At the moment the anti-tobacco regulation is only an article under the bylaw for air pollution control. We would also like to revise the existing regulation,” Dollaris Riauaty Suhadi, executive director of Swisscontact Indonesia Foundation, told the Jakarta Globe on Thursday.

With funding from a $361,000 grant from the Bloomberg Initiative to improve public health in Jakarta, Dollaris said the two organizations would seek to clarify aspects of the existing legislation.

A “smoke-free” area, Dollaris said, “is an area that not just prohibits people from smoking, but also precludes the selling and marketing of cigarettes.”

She added that smoke-free areas would include schools, places of worship, health facilities, playgrounds, public transport, public spaces and the workplace.

The anti-smoking bylaws, she said, were not deemed sufficient to deter smokers.

“Treating it like a crime would mean that there is going to be a trial process for smoking, which makes it complicated when all we want is to have a rule that would be easy to enforce and low-cost, but effective,” Dollaris said.

The capital’s environment agency and SIF are expecting to have completed an inspection of 780 city administration offices by April to check on the implementation of the smoking ban. The results will be submitted to Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo for further action.

Inspections of other public buildings will soon follow, and violators will be “name and shamed” on a public Web site, www.smokefreejakarta.or.id, Dollaris said.

The two-year project, managed by SIF and funded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s foundation, is aimed at achieving a smoke-free Jakarta by 2011.

“We chose to work with enforcing [existing] smoke-free legislation, since we believe that it will be more effective than anti-tobacco campaigns,” she said. “I think anti-tobacco campaigns will never beat the marketing efforts of cigarette companies.”