Does Indonesia have Emancipation Days?
Not observed here
Indonesia's national holiday list contains no emancipation anniversary. Presidential Decision No. 8 of 2024, signed on 29 January 2024, consolidated rules that had been scattered across several earlier decisions into a single instrument and set out that year's sixteen holidays — from New Year's Day, Lunar New Year, Idulfitri and International Labour Day to the Birth of Pancasila and Christmas — and none of them belongs to this category; the same decision leaves the dates of the Islamic New Year, Idulfitri and Iduladha to be fixed each year by the minister responsible for religious affairs. Indonesia writes the matter into a rights statute rather than into the calendar. Article 4 of Law No. 39 of 1999 on Human Rights places the right not to be enslaved among the rights that may not be reduced under any circumstances by anyone; article 20 then states, in its first paragraph, that no one may be enslaved or held in servitude, and in its second, that slavery and servitude, the slave trade, the trade in women and any act whatsoever with a similar purpose are prohibited.
What is this topic?
The two largest slaveholding societies in the Americas both waited until the 2020s to put abolition on the national holiday calendar — the United States in 2021, Brazil in 2023 — more than a century and a half after slavery ended in law.
Both arrived the same way, from below: Texas made 19 June a state holiday in 1980, and Brazil's 20 November passed through the school calendar and then a commemorative-date statute before it became a holiday.
India has no abolition holiday; the closest date, Ambedkar Jayanti on 14 April, is not even on the central government's annual holiday list and is granted each year by a separate order.
Taiwan names 21 March in statute and expressly gives no day off, Japan has the law but no date, and neither Indonesia's nor China's national holiday list contains anything of the kind.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.