Navigating Human Rights in Indonesia and Beyond

Abstract

In Indonesia, promoting human rights is a long battle run. Human rights were just formally recognised when Suharto's authoritarian regime ended in 1998, but these rights have experienced a rise and fall throughout the Reformasi. Indonesia successfully amended the 1945 Constitution with more human rights provisions and enacted Human Rights Law 39/1999. However, this country still faces the challenges of ensuring that human rights are promoted with the state’s obligation to respect, protect and fulfil amidst the debates on institutional reforms, universalism and relativism, as well as the limited powers of the national human rights institutions. Along with efforts to ensure that democracy and human rights can coexist, democratisation in Indonesia is also inextricably linked to advancing human rights. After two decades of Indonesia's reform, human rights and democracy have become vital cornerstones, but they have experienced serious challenges in their promotion. From the Indonesian context, these discourses can relate to those discourses in other Global South countries, like India, that this edition will elaborate on due to their relatively similar and unique pathways with arduous tasks in managing domestic affairs. Indonesia can represent critical, which is more likely underrepresented discourses with robust arguments on various social, economic, political and cultural situations in the Southern Hemisphere, from which these debates endure and are usually more centred on the West and, to some extent, the Global North. These discourses from the Global South countries can provide a frequently unheard perspective to current discussions on human rights. By navigating human rights in Indonesia and beyond, these discourses highlight how the new justification of human rights can contribute to emancipatory initiatives.