The objective of the article is to examine the human rights enforcement in Indonesian legal and political system. This is done by studying the legal basis of human rights, the process of proliferation of human rights discourse, and the actual controversies of human rights enforcement. The study has the effect of highlighting some of the immense deficits in ensuring that violations are treated under judicial procedure and the protection of human rights is available and accessible for victims. The author inevitably came into a conclusion that the openness of legal and political arenas for human rights discourses is not followed with a tangible impact on the entitlement positions of the people. The problems of the weak institutions and the unenthusiastic enforcement show that, in Indonesia, human rights are formally adopted as a political strategy to avoid substantial implementation.
The norms and ideals of human rights are increasingly invoked by civil society organisations to construct claims related to land tenure and access to food, particularly to challenge a massive expansion of agricultural investment in a developing country. While this has facilitated negotiations on rights and the formulation of claims, studies that investigate to what extent such endeavours achieve the transformational goals advocated by human rights proponents or in particular whether they have been successful in instigating any institutional reform in the governance of massive agricultural modernisation projects are scanty. After discussing a national agricultural modernisation project, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), set up in Merauke, Papua, the article concludes that the analysis of the transformative role of human rights requires a prudent examination of the role of the State in the negotiation process, the patterns of socio-cultural interactions signifying the political setting and the pressure experienced and perceived by actors that affect the issues selected and omitted.
In the last decade, ASEAN has made substantial steps towards adopting human rights, by creating the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) in 2009 and adopting the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012. However, these developments do not lead to the establishment of an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism. The article aims to investigate the deadlock in ASEAN by examining to what extent that relates to institutional challenges i. e. legal and political structures consist of existing norms, persistent discourses pertaining to human rights, at regional and national levels.
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