Legal Evolution And Political Authority In Indonesia

For nearly forty years, following the collapse of Indonesia's parliamentary system, Indonesia's once independent legal institutions were transformed into dedicated instruments of a powerful elite and allowed to sink into a deep mire of corruption and malfeasance. Legal process was devastated far beyond the capacity of any simple effort at reconstruction by post-Suharto governments. Indonesia's problems in this respect surpass those of other countries in the region compelled by economic crisis to re-examine institutional structures. The works reprinted in this collection constitute a case study over time of legal decay and the rise of reform interests in one of the most complex countries in the world. Written during a period of more than thirty years, beginning in the early 1960s, the essays trace several themes in the legal history of modern Indonesia. They make clear, however, that legal history is seldom that alone, but rather, like law itself, is largely derivative, fundamentally imbedded in the interest, ideas, purposes, and contentions of local political, social, and economic power.

Through the compelling personal story of human rights lawyer Yap Thiam Hien (1913-1989), from his Hakka Chinese family origins in the Aceh province of colonial Indonesia to his receiving the first Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Human Rights Award in 1987, this volume brings decades of modern Indonesian history to life.

Building on extensive fieldwork in China and Indonesia, Hurst offers a valuable comparison of legal systems in practice.

This book examines the numerous new courts created throughout Asia during the last 20 years, covering important jurisdictions including human rights, intellectual property disputes, bankruptcy petitions, commercial contracts, public law adjudication, personal law, labour and industrial disputes. It evaluates their performances, and considers the broader economic, social and political implications.

Offers an analysis of the politics of court reform through a focused review of Indonesia's complex court system.

This book examines gender, state and social power in Indonesia, focusing in particular on state regulation of divorce from 1965 to 2005 and its impact on women. Indonesia experienced high divorce rates in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by a remarkable decline. Already falling divorce rates were reinforced by the 1974 Marriage Law, which for the first time regulated marriage for both Muslim and non-Muslim Indonesians and restricted access to divorce. This law defined the roles of men and women in Indonesian society, vesting household leadership with husbands and the management of the household with wives. Drawing on a wide selection of primary sources, including court records, legal codes, newspaper reports, fiction, interviews and case studies, this book provides a detailed historical account of this period of important social change, exploring fully the impact and operation of state regulation of divorce, including the New Order government’s aims in enacting this legal framework, its effects in practice and how it was utilised by citizens (both men and women) to advance their own agendas. It argues that the Marriage Law was a tool of social control enacted by the New Order government in response to the social upheaval and protests experienced in the mid 1970s. However, it also shows that state power was not hegemonic: it was both contested and co-opted by citizens, with men and women enjoying different degrees of autonomy from the state. This book explores all of these issues, providing important insights on the nature of the New Order regime, social power and gender relations, both during the years of its rule and since its collapse.

This book focuses on the aftermath of World War II in Asia as described in a sobering and insightful history of two types of redress: compensation for material war damage and restitution of looted property. Japanese Army units and citizens stole goods while shelling and bombardment by all sides destroyed factories, offices and residential neighbourhoods. How were these cases of material damage and loss to be rectified, and who was to rectify them? What financial means and legal precedents were there to fall back on at a time of decolonization, independence struggle, and shifting alliances on the brink of the Cold War? The politics of redress makes an important contribution to the study of law and society in Southeast Asia. It lays bare the complex web of interconnections between politics, law and economy from a comparative historical perspective.

Successful transitions to enduring democracy are both difficult and rare. In Scandal and Democracy, Mary E. McCoy explores how newly democratizing nations can avoid reverting to authoritarian solutions in response to the daunting problems brought about by sudden change. The troubled transitions that have derailed democratization in nations worldwide make this problem a major concern for scholars and citizens alike. This study of Indonesia's transition from authoritarian rule sheds light on the fragility not just of democratic transitions but of democracy itself and finds that democratization's durability depends, to a surprising extent, on the role of the media, particularly its airing of political scandal and intraelite conflict. More broadly, Scandal and Democracy examines how the media's use of new freedoms can help ward off a slide into pseudodemocracy or a return to authoritarian rule. As Indonesia marks the twentieth anniversary of its democratic revolution of 1998, it remains among the world's most resilient new democracies and one of the few successful democratic transitions in the Muslim world. McCoy explains the media's central role in this change and corroborates that finding with comparative cases from Mexico, Tunisia, and South Korea, offering counterintuitive insights that help make sense of the success and failure of recent transitions to democracy.