Indigenous rights advocates petition to overturn Indonesian conservation law

JAKARTA — For years, Mikael Ane, an Indigenous farmer from the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia, has faced prison not for harming the environment, but for trying to protect his ancestral land.

In 2013, he was sentenced to 1.5 years in prison for cutting trees in his ancestral forest in Ruteng, which the government had designated a nature park, despite his family having lived there since 1932, before Indonesia became a nation.

A decade later, in March 2023, he was arrested again, this time for building a house on the same land.

“They came and arrested me right in front of my house while I was having coffee with my wife and my son and daughter,” Mikael told Mongabay. “I was shocked. They [my family] were also confused; they didn’t seem to understand the reason for the arrest.”

A state court in Ruteng found him to be violating the 1999 forestry law and the old 1990 conservation law and sentenced him to 1.5 years in prison. But in May 2024, the Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict, declaring that Mikael’s actions did not constitute a criminal offense.

Rights groups hailed the ruling as a rare victory for Indigenous land defenders in Indonesia’s conservation system, where state-designated protected areas often overlap with customary territories.

Mikael’s case, while resolved in his favor, reflects a deeper problem in Indonesia’s conservation regime, one that he and national civil society groups are now challenging in court.

Legal challenge

The law that Mikael and civil groups are challenging is the new 2024 conservation law, which replaced the 1990 conservation law by updating outdated provisions and expanding coverage to marine areas.

Having been targeted multiple times under conservation laws, Mikael had hoped the new law would finally recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples who live in and manage conservation areas as he does.

But instead, the law continues to sideline communities like his and potentially criminalizes their traditional practices.

Indigenous rights proponents say this is because the new law was passed without meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples like Mikael, resulting in a law that continues to neglect the existence of Indigenous peoples in the management of conservation areas.

Mikael fears the new law will once again open the door to similar criminalization of other Indigenous communities that have long lived within conservation zones.

Therefore, Mikael, together with the country’s largest advocacy group for Indigenous rights, AMAN, the country’s oldest environmental group, Walhi, and an NGO advocating for coastal communities’ rights, KIARA, filed a judicial review petition with the Constitutional Court, seeking to overturn the new law.

“The law in question does not provide space for full and effective participation in determining conservation areas based on customary law and traditional knowledge,” reads one of the legal arguments in the judicial review. “This is because there is no provision recognizing Indigenous peoples as legal subjects in conservation management.”

As a result, Indigenous peoples like Mikael could face criminalization and eviction from their ancestral lands, the plaintiffs argue.

Despite growing scientific evidence that Indigenous peoples are among the most effective stewards of nature, the new law fails to accommodate their rights.

Database records indicate 22.5 million hectares (55.6 million acres) of Indigenous territories in Indonesia have high conservation potential, highlighting the critical role of Indigenous stewardship.

Despite their proven role in protecting these forests, Indigenous voices were largely left out of the drafting process for the new law.

Closed-door deliberations

The legal challenge targets not the content of the law, but the process by which it was passed — what’s known in Indonesia as a formal review.

The plaintiffs argue the process was opaque and excluded participation from the most affected parties, like Mikael, who have faced multiple criminalization efforts in the past.

“I’ve never read or heard about the new law. I don’t know anything about it,” Mikael said.

Muhammad Arman, AMAN director of policy advocacy and law, pointed out that out of 30 parliamentary meetings deliberating the law, only two were open to the public.

“The rest were held behind closed doors, as the government itself admitted during the Constitutional Court hearings,” he said during a recent press conference in Jakarta.

Furthermore, only five meetings were broadcast via live streaming on the parliament’s YouTube channel, according to Arif Adiputro, a program manager at the watchdog Indonesian Parliamentary Center (IPC).

Lasti Fardilla Noor of the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Areas and Territories Indonesia acknowledged that activists and representatives of Indigenous peoples had been invited to parliamentary meetings.

But that’s only after the working group asked the Parliament to be involved in the lawmaking process, she said.

And their participation in the process was merely symbolic, as they weren’t given enough time to voice their opinions, and none of their recommendations were accepted in the final law, Lasti added.

Token invitations

One of the Indigenous peoples invited to the parliamentary meetings was Putu Ardana from Bali.

When he was given the opportunity to speak during a parliamentary meeting on April 10, 2023, there were only four lawmakers present to hear his thoughts. And the lawmakers gave him only 10 minutes to deliver his presentation.

“The issue was very important, but I had to rush through my presentation, and unfortunately, not a single lawmaker responded,” Putu said during a hearing at the Constitutional Court on May 2.

After the meeting on April 10, Putu said he received no further information about the lawmaking process until he heard that the bill had already been passed into law.

Lasti said the working group didn’t receive any feedback at all after the group submitted its recommendations to the Parliament.

“Unfortunately, our recommendations, including lists of issues [DIMs] and critical notes, were ignored. The government insisted that only lawmakers could draft DIMs and that community input was merely for consideration. This means our submissions were meaningless in shaping the law. So what was the point of our participation?” she said.

And when the working group organized several forums on the draft law and invited the government to attend, officials never showed up, Lasti said.

Responding to the criticisms, Satyawan Pudyatmoko, the director-general of natural resources and ecosystem conservation at the Ministry of Forestry, said the government and the Parliament had made some efforts to include non-state actors, like academicians and activists, in the lawmaking process by organizing discussions in universities.

However, Lasti noted that only academicians, conservationists and business people, not Indigenous peoples and local communities, had been invited to these discussions.

Further evidence of lack of transparency and meaningful public participation is the restriction of access to 20 documents related to the legislative process, according to the plaintiffs. These documents are minutes of the parliamentary meetings.

Satyawan said such documents are classified as confidential and access can only be granted through a formal written request.

Arif said the IPC had submitted a formal request for information to the Parliament to access the documents, but in July 2024, the Parliament rejected the request under the reason that it didn’t possess the requested document.

Beyond procedural flaws, the law itself contains clauses that rights groups say could worsen the criminalization of Indigenous communities.

Problematic provisions

Anggi Putra Prayoga, the advocacy and campaign manager at the NGO Forest Watch Indonesia, cited Article 9 of the new law, which states that if land rights holders in conservation areas refuse to conduct conservation activities, they must relinquish their land rights in exchange for compensation.

The issue with this is that what is deemed to be conservation activities by the government might be different from Indigenous practices, like the ones done by the Mentawai people, one of the oldest tribes in Indonesia who live a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the coastal and rainforest areas of the Mentawai Islands.

Their traditional diet includes primates, a practice rooted in cultural and ecological knowledge. But this practice is not regulated in the law, even if Indigenous peoples like the Mentawai people consume and utilize species for specific purposes, such as rituals, without overexploiting them.

Besides failing to regulate customary sustainable use of biodiversity, the new law also doesn’t guarantee the right to free, prior and informed consent for Indigenous peoples in the process of designating conservation areas or in decisions impacting their territories — a key principle in Indigenous rights recognized under international law, Lasti said.

The absence of such provisions shows that their existence and rights are not acknowledged, resulting in communities often being excluded when investments or projects enter their territories, she added.

This is particularly concerning because many conservation zones include lands that Indigenous peoples and local communities have long sustainably managed.

In its legal challenge, the plaintiffs noted that 16.3 million people live in 6,744 villages within 27.4 million hectares (67.7 million acres) of conservation areas in Indonesia.

As these communities who live in conservation zones still lack legal recognition or tenure security, they are at risk of being criminalized and displaced from their lands, Anggi said.

Rudianto Lallo, a lawmaker involved in the deliberation of the law, argued that the new law has accommodated the presence and role of Indigenous peoples in conservation by explicitly regulating the involvement of Indigenous communities in conservation.

Furthermore, a stated aim of the new law is to improve the welfare of communities, including Indigenous peoples living around protected areas, he said.

No true justice

However, an analysis by AMAN found that the provision that regulates the involvement of Indigenous communities in conservation is limited in its scope, as it only allows communities to be involved in conservation through public participation.

The analysis says the law treats Indigenous peoples as passive stakeholders, not rights holders, excluding provisions for land rights or co-management.

“The government still treats Indigenous peoples as stakeholders [with limited participation in conservation], not as rights holders in the concept and management of conservation in Indonesia,” AMAN said in its analysis.

This approach is apparent in the case of Mikael, who was invited by government conservation officers on May 13, 2025, to collaborate with them on reforestation of water catchment areas.

However, Mikael rejected the invitation, saying that it’s something Indigenous peoples in the area like him have always been doing anyway.

“To protect water sources, we follow ancestral rules: it’s strictly forbidden to work in water source areas. No farming allowed there. If you want to farm, you must replant trees. That’s what we’ve always done,” he said. “If trees were cut near a water source, then you must replant them.”

Instead, Mikael said he only wanted justice and for the government to recognize his rights.

“My hope is simply for justice. I was detained despite being innocent,” he said. “In both cases, my children were neglected, my wife had to work alone and we’ve had no income since I was imprisoned. So we haven’t been able to meet daily needs. We couldn’t afford to send our kids to school.”

Anggi warned that if the government and lawmakers don’t change this approach of treating Indigenous peoples as stakeholders rather than rights holders, then there will be massive displacement of Indigenous peoples from their territories.

As of this story’s publication, the judicial review is still under deliberation at the Constitutional Court.

As the Constitutional Court weighs the challenge, the case may decide whether Indigenous land defenders like Mikael will remain vulnerable to prosecution — or finally gain the recognition they’ve long been denied.

“The recognition and protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights must be integral to conservation policy,” Anggi said. “They are, in truth, the guardians of Indonesia’s rich biodiversity.”

Banner image: Women from the Moa Indigenous community in Central Sulawesi live on the fringe of a national park established in the 1990s and practice subsistence farming there. Image by Sarjan Lahay/Mongabay Indonesia.

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Hans Nicholas Jong Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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