A new citizenship bill will eliminate the ethnic and racial discrimination that exists in Indonesia's current law, the Jakarta post daily on Thursday quoted a legislator as saying.

Lawmaker Slamet Effendy Yusuf, who heads a working team to discuss the final form of the bill, said on Wednesday the House of Representatives would revise Law No. 62/1958 on citizenship, which was widely deemed "discriminatory, not respecting human rights and gender-biased".

"We want to eliminate all (the biases). The existing law does not recognize the rights of children from mixed marriages. The bill will eliminate this," he said.

Last week, the working team unanimously agreed to include limited dual citizenship among articles for deliberation.

The team also scrapped other discriminatory articles in the citizenship bill, including those that distinguished "indigenous Indonesians" from people from other countries who had become Indonesian citizens.

Slamet said the "indigenous Indonesian" clauses could cause discrimination in society because they treated people differently.

"Therefore, we have now defined 'indigenous Indonesians' as those people who are Indonesian citizens without going through a naturalization process," he said.

Separately, another House team discussed a bill Wednesday to protect citizens from other forms of ethnic and racial discrimination.

The team invited senior researcher Harry Tjan Silalahi of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), constitutional law expert Satya Arinanto and former human rights minister Hasballah M. Saad to speak to the meeting.

Source: Xinhua