As Indonesia becomes the epicentre of the pandemic, a growing number of volunteer groups have assembled to fill in gaps in the government response.
Human Rights
The results of research published sheds light on why women are minimally represented in official Covid-19 taskforce structures while having overwhelming majority representation in the frontlines of emergency and pandemic responses.
Indonesia’s rapidly escalating COVID-19 outbreak is infecting and killing children at an unprecedented rate, as Save the Children Indonesia issues an urgent plea to the international community for more vaccines.
Just a few days before he was fatally shot in the thigh, Indonesian journalist Mara Salem Harahap, who was known as Marsal, took his wife and two children on a family outing to the city of Medan in North Sumatra, about two hours away from their home. During the trip, they took a family photograph together and Marsal shared the picture on social media.
A recent ruling by Indonesia’s Supreme Court canceled a government regulation issued in February that allowed millions of girls and women in thousands of state schools a basic freedom: to choose whether or not to wear a jilbab.
NAIDOC week has just begun and, after several tumultuous years of disasters in Australia, the theme this year is Heal Country. In the last two years, Australia has suffered crippling drought that saw the Darling-Baaka run dry, catastrophic bushfires, and major flooding throughout coastal and inland areas of Australia’s east.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread into Central Sulawesi in early 2020, two challenges landed on the desk of local food seller, Yuyun, at the same time. They affected both sides of her balance sheet.
In 2014, the Ministry of Health issued a regulation that stated female genital mutilation had no medical basis or health benefits and violated women’s reproductive rights, without banning the practice outright.
Transwomen rarely get a fair representation in Indonesian media, and it’s due time that they be given a platform to speak up and tell their stories.
Indonesian police are looking into the sudden death of an official who fought against a controversial gold mine, following calls for an investigation. Helmud Hontong, deputy regent of Indonesia’s remote Sangihe islands, died during a flight last Wednesday.
It wasn’t exactly the start to the professional life Agus dreamed of. For the past three years, the 23-year-old struggled to obtain college credits via his internship program, having toiled without pay at three different companies.
Forty years ago, on June 5, 1981, a different health threat emerged that caused global alarm. But it would take decades for an effective treatment for HIV and AIDS to become widely available, and there is still no vaccine.
The number of reported cases of forced labor among Indonesian migrant fishermen has risen nearly twofold in one year, a new report has shown, prompting renewed calls for the government to ratify a convention protecting workers at sea.
Bills in the federal and New South Wales parliaments have sought to stop teachers talking about gender and sexuality diversity in the name of either religious freedom or parents’ rights.
“I prefer to treat COVID-19 patients (rather) than HIV-patients.” It is difficult to imagine a health care worker saying this to a patient, but it is evidence of the stigma that continues to surround HIV-patients in Indonesia.
The 74th World Health Assembly (WHA) takes place from May 24 to June 1. This year’s gathering is likely to be all about COVID-19, but here I want to talk about a different disease—leprosy—and a resolution that was adopted at the WHA exactly 30 years ago.
