Indonesia's Implementation of Inventory Obligation under UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention: Problems in the Online Inventories

Article 12 of the Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003, provides that the States Parties are under obligation at the national level to draw up one or more inventories of the intangible cultural heritage present in their respective territories. Indonesia has been a State Party to the Convention since 2007, but until now, no specific law on intangible cultural heritage has been enacted. In 2010, the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, jointly with UNESCO, published the Practical Handbook for Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Indonesia. With the legal vacuum, the Handbook became a source for guidelines on the implementation of the inventory obligation in Indonesia; it provides that there shall be a manual inventory and an online inventory. However, in practice, there are two web sites functioning as online inventories, and the contents of the two web sites do not seem to reflect one of the Convention's purposes, which is awareness. This article scrutinizes the contents of the publicly accessible online inventories and finds that the absence of statutory regulation has resulted in difficulties for those inventories to fulfill the purpose of awareness as mandated by the Convention.