International Consortium for Law and Development

Knowledge in the Service of Democratic Social Change

Nukila Evanty

Ms. Evanty is a former legislative drafter for the Indonesian House of Representatives. She is currently working as a Legal Consultant and Legislative Drafting Teacher for ADKASI (Association of Local Parliaments in All Regency Level). She also assists the United Nations, and works as professor of law in Catholic Atmajaya University, where she teaches legislative drafting.

Nukila graduated from Faculty of Law University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Tulane Law School and Loyola School of Law in New Orleans, USA, Lund University in Sweden,  Uppsala university in Sweden, Public School of Administration in London. She also completed a short course in “Legislative Drafting for Democratic Social hanges" at Boston School of Law with Professors Bob and Ann Seidman.

At ADKASI, Ms. Evanti assists Members of Parliament (MPs) in All Regency Level (Around 330 regencies in Indonesia) in legislative drafting -- not only about the techniques but also in substantive matters. She provides MPs with legal advise regarding Local Rules, National Laws and Decisions by the government. ADKASI receives funding from USAID, UNDP and other funding agencies to support its parliamentary capacity building program.

ADKASI was established on August 28, 2001 and began operating on February 1, 2002, when the National Secretariat was set-up in Jakarta. ADKASI seeks to empower the "Indonesian regency legislative councils in the framework of regional autonomy implementation through good governance”.

ADKASI's main activities include the laws and regulations advocacy, and capacity building or training to empower the capacity of all regency local parliaments (DPRD Kabupaten) in Indonesia. Since early 2002, they have conducted training/workshop/seminars in the areas of legislative drafting, performance based budgetting, parcipatory planning, advocacy technique, and standing order and code of ethics for Members of Parliament in all regency local parliaments in Indonesia.

We realizes that since Law No.22/2003 about the “Formation of MPR (General Assembly Meeting), DPR (The House of Representatives of the Republic of Indonesia), DPD (Representatives of Regency People), and DPRD ( Regency Local Parliaments)  has been implemented and Law No. 32/2004 about “ Local Governance” have been revised and implemented, there is significance change in the function and duty of those institutions.

Now, DPRD has the strategic role in determining policies in regency level and national level. DPRD has the extremely power in its three main functions, namely, legislation/law making function , scrutiny function and budget functions. Legislation function without ignoring others main function is “the core bussiness of DPRD”.