Jakarta. Indonesia has officially become a part of the world’s anti-nuclear pact after Foreign Affairs Minister Retno Marsudi presented the country’s ratified document to the UN Secretariat on Tuesday local time.

Retno is currently in New York --home to the UN-- for a series of sessions held by the international organization. Indonesia’s handover of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is one of the main outcomes of Retno’s overseas trip. The UN Secretary-General is the depositary of this treaty.

The Indonesian House of Representatives passed the TPNW document into law last year after the country signed the nuclear ban treaty back in 2017. Jakarta was also among the early state parties of the nuclear weapon ban treaty back then.

The term “state party” refers to countries that have accepted and ratified an international instrument. By becoming a state party, Indonesia --alongside other countries-- promised to never develop or possess nuclear weapons under any circumstances.

“By depositing this ratified document, Indonesia officially becomes a state party to the TPNW,” the Foreign Affairs Ministry announced Wednesday.

The ministry said that Indonesia would continue to convince other countries to make the nuclear ban pledge under the TPNW. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons database, Indonesia was not the only one to officially accede to the global anti-nuke pact on Tuesday. Sierra Leone and the Solomon Islands also did the same that day. There are currently 94 signatories and 73 state parties to the TPNW treaty.

This is not the only nuclear document that Indonesia is part of. 

As an ASEAN member, Indonesia has signed a similar pledge to keep the Southeast Asian region free of nuclear weapons. But the ASEAN document --better known as the Treaty of Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ)-- has legally binding protocols for the five nuclear weapon states. They are China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US. 

At an ASEAN meeting in Laos earlier this year, Retno admitted that progress was sluggish for the SEANWFZ document. Despite the treaty dating back to 1995, no nuclear weapon state has inked the protocol. ASEAN claimed that China had promised the group that they would ink the SEANWFZ protocols, but Beijing to this day has yet to walk the talk.

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