JAKARTA, May 7 (Reuters) – Victims of last year’s deadly floods in Indonesia’s Sumatra filed a lawsuit to the state court on Thursday, urging the government to grant national disaster status to three affected provinces and suspend approvals for new forest use permits.
Following are the key details of the lawsuit:
• The state administrative court received the lawsuit documents on Thursday, the court’s website showed.
• Seven residents of Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra filed the suit against Indonesia’s president, its environment, forestry and agriculture ministers as well as the head of the country’s disaster mitigation agency, said Diki Rafiqi, one of the petitioners.
• They demanded that the government immediately grants national disaster status to the three affected provinces, with the existing reconstruction process now stalled because of the limited budget allocated by the provincial governments, Diki told Reuters.
• If national disaster status is granted, the central government must use the state budget to pay for the reconstruction process, which includes the building of temporary accommodation or permanent new housing for the people affected.
• “Many residents still do not have temporary houses … This is the most basic thing and it’s due to the local government’s limited financial capacity,” Diki said.
• The petitioners also demanded the government to impose a moratorium on the issuing of new forest use, mining and plantation permits until land in the three provinces has been completely rehabilitated, Diki said.
• The petitioners also asked the government to review existing mining, forest use and plantation permits, he added.
• At least 1,200 people were killed and 300,000 homes damaged from the cyclone-induced floods and landslides last year.
• Environmental groups said that the impact of the storms was exacerbated by rapid deforestation in Sumatra.
(Reporting by Ananda Teresia; Editing by David Stanway)
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