Cause Lawyering and Human Rights in Indonesia - Transcript

Duncan McCargo [00:00:09]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a political science professor here at the University of Copenhagen. And today I'm going to be chatting to Tim Mann, who just arrived to take up a postdoctoral position here at NIAS at the beginning of March. Tim, welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast.

Tim Mann [00:00:31]

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Duncan McCargo [00:00:34]

Tim, you've just joined us from the University of Melbourne where you finished your PhD last year at the Melbourne Law School, and for more than a decade you've been working in and studying about Indonesia with a particular focus on human rights and the justice sector. So before starting your PhD in 2018, you worked with various international organisations, mainly in the development field. Our listeners. Might there be intrigued to know that you started your career by training as a vet? Is there any link between your original interest in caring for animals and your subsequent focus on rights related matters in Indonesia?

Tim Mann [00:01:04]

Yeah, I do have quite an unusual career background. I have a long standing interest in Indonesia. I studied the language in high school after my first degree was in veterinary science, as you say, and soon after I graduated I went to the Indonesian part of Borneo Kalimantan, where I worked and lived for a year on an orangutan rehabilitation center. It was an incredible, life changing experience. But I found through that year in Kalimantan, I was really exposed to and I became interested in some of the complexities around the interactions between conservation and the rights of local and indigenous people and how that interacts with policy around palm oil as well. Following that year in Kalimantan, I then went back and studied developments. I did a masters in development studies in Melbourne and it was really from there that my work in Indonesia really began and I spent several very enriching years working with an international NGO in Jakarta where I got to work and collaborate with a broad range of civil society organisations in Indonesia.

Duncan McCargo [00:02:20]

So you wrote your doctorate on what you call cause lawyering in Indonesia. I'm familiar with that from Frank Munger's work in relation to Thailand, and this was with particular reference to the Indonesian foundation of Legal aid institutes, or LBH as I believe we should abbreviate it. Perhaps to start with, can you explain what you mean by cause lawyering as a concept?

Tim Mann [00:02:40]

Cause lawyering is a term that was introduced by to US based scholars, Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold in around 1998. It's essentially about using the law to promote or resist social change. So, a really key element of the definition of the concept is a degree of moral or political commitment to a cause. You can distinguish cause lawyers from conventional lawyers in that they see their role as extending beyond simply client service to the service of a cause. This term is often used interchangeably with other terms like public interest law, social justice, lawyering, activist lawyering or political lawyering. I ended up using the term cause lawyering to describe the work of LBH because because of the broad nature of the term, because of its inclusive nature, there's no one term that really is quite right to describe the work of activist lawyers in Indonesia. So I think cause lawyering is probably a broad term that suits our purposes.

Duncan McCargo [00:03:54]

Right? Guess for me as a political scientist, it sounds as though cause lawyers are basically lawyers who to some conscious degree are engaged in political activity. Would that be pushing the boundaries of the concept as you understand it?

Tim Mann [00:04:07]

I think that's that's a reasonable definition. I wouldn't call them solely political lawyers, but yeah, more or less.

Duncan McCargo [00:04:14]

And that it may be in the hinterland between social and political issues, wherever that lies. Yeah. And then what's the significance of this Indonesian foundation of Legal Aid Institute? How big a player have they been in the landscape of organizations working in this area? Because for most people, phrase legal aid conjures up this image of volunteer law students helping members of marginalized communities dealing with their court cases. But my sense is that this organization has surprise, surprise, a more overt political and advocacy role as well. That dates back quite a long way.

Tim Mann [00:04:45]

Yeah, that's right. So the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, commonly referred to by its Indonesian acronym, [LBH] was established in 1970 under President Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime, which ran from 1966 to 1998. It was established with the initial goal of providing free legal aid to poor and marginalized Indonesians. It began just as a single office in Jakarta, and it now has 18 different branch offices across the country. But as you say, even from its early days, it was never solely about expanding access to justice. So it was also motivated by a desire to limit state power at a time when the courts were really subservient to the executive. It very quickly realized that providing conventional legal aid under the new orders, authoritarian system would only end up legitimizing the status quo. So this eventually led leaders to develop their own ideology or approach to legal aid, which they called structural legal aid. And this concept essentially held that legal aid should be directed at addressing the structural causes of inequality that were really at the root of the legal problems faced by the poor. So what this meant in more practical terms was that there was quickly a shift from focusing on the problems of individuals to a greater focus on problems affecting communities. And in terms of practical strategies, this meant that there was more of an effort to engage in community organizing, community legal education, research and media campaigns to supplement the litigation activity. If you think about it, during that new order period, as the new order period progressed, it continued to get even more political and more adversarial. It really developed into a hub of resistance to the New Order regime. And like a bit of a gathering point for activists, journalists, workers groups, a whole range of social movement groups that were involved in opposition to the Suharto regime. It conducted a lot of public discussions helping to popularize ideas around democracy and human rights. It even labelled itself as a locomotive of democracy at one point. It had this very, as you say, political and oppositional role.

Duncan McCargo [00:07:36]

Right. Fascinating. So in some ways, the phrase legal aid in the title is a little bit misleading because it's really sort of aid plus advocacy.

Tim Mann [00:07:44]

That's a fair comment. Legal aid is always going to be their core business, but they do have this very important non-litigation-role.

Duncan McCargo [00:07:53]

And was it the case that to some extent that sort of legal aid service provision badge was a cover under which they could operate during especially the late Suharto period as dissent against the regime was growing? They could say yes, but rather like doctors can use a certain kind of cover. They could use this this legal aid umbrella as a kind of protection or...

Tim Mann [00:08:17]

Maybe especially during the the earlier years of the organisation in the very constrained environment of the new order. The courts were used as a safe public forum where they could raise highly sensitive political issues and be guaranteed a little bit more safety. And so in some of the the case defence around that time, they really use the courtroom and use the defence of these cases as like a form of political theatre. They, knew that they weren't going to win these cases, but they used the safe environment of the courtroom to bring injustice to public attention, to really make points about the abuses of the regime at a time where it was hard to do that elsewhere.

Duncan McCargo [00:09:05]

Right. Yeah, it's fascinating. Now, even listeners who don't follow Indonesia as closely as they might and here I've got to plead guilty myself. They might well be aware of a number of recent controversies relating to, for example, new laws that have been promoted recently in Indonesia, like the so-called omnibus bill that some commentators have viewed as an example of democratic rollback, of potentially curtailing the freedoms of individual citizens. How important have the roles played by these kind of civil society organisations been in the last couple of years in terms of promoting awareness around these kinds of concerns?

Tim Mann [00:09:39]

When we're talking about democratic regression in Indonesia, people would say that it probably has been going on for about almost a decade now. One of the the high points or the low points of Democratic regression that made headlines around the world was in 2019, when the legislature passed a revised law on the Corruption Eradication Commission, which seriously weakened its powers. And at that time as well, the lawmaker said that they plan to pass a regressive criminal code, which, as you probably know, was then eventually passed at the end of last year. But during 2019, it was really interesting to see the way that LBH responded. So under the Suharto period during the New Order years, it was acting as this hub of civil society resistance to the regime. There was clearly an effort by the organization to try and perform this kind of role again, this convening coalition building role in civil society. During those very tense weeks the office of LBH was like a hive of activity. They were holding press conferences almost daily. There wes a whole different range of groups visiting the office. They were really trying to connect with the leaders of the student movement and... And provide them with data and advocacy materials, things that they could use. And so the catch cry, the rallying call of those protests in 2019 was Reformaci Corrupti, or "Reform Corrupted". We actually saw that that rallying cry was created at a meeting of multiple civil society activists at the LBH office one evening. So there was this real attempt from the civil society activists to really play a role and contribute to the protests at that time, just to continue on in terms of the omnibus law, they also played a similar role in 2020 when we saw these big protests against the omnibus law on job creation. It was a slightly different context because that was during the pandemic and they weren't able to act as a physical hub, but they were really trying to perform this kind of facilitation networking role. In the end, the protests against the omnibus law in 2020 were even larger than the protests in 2019.

Duncan McCargo [00:12:14]

You mentioned having been in Indonesia doing PhD fieldwork and you're obviously working in this field of socio legal studies. And one thing I discovered when I ventured into this field is you can very easily get lost in documents. There are huge numbers of legally related documents and petitions and court orders and who knows what. It seems, though, that your approach to studying these issues has a slightly more ethnographic dimension. So could you talk a bit about how you do your research?

Tim Mann [00:12:44]

Sure. I did use multiple methods and it certainly did involve a lot of examination of documents. The bulk of my data was collected through in-depth interviews with current and past lawyers from LBH. And I spent most of 2019 spending some time in the LBH office. I mainly stayed in the YLBHE, which is the umbrella organization that oversees the 18 branch offices. And just speaking to the lawyers, doing that day to day work, I ended up doing about 70 in-depth interviews with predominantly lawyers from LHA, but also about ten representatives from donor organizations that fund LBH's work. I was mainly focused on the central umbrella organization in Jakarta, but did spend a bit of time traveling to some of the regional offices as well to look at the dynamics on the ground in some of the more prominent regional offices. And then I did look at a number of cases that LBA has handled. So that did involve looking at court decisions. I looked at a lot of that annual reports extending back to the Sahartu years and also during the Sahartu years because there was little social media and so on. The organization was producing a lot of documents about its approach to legal aid and activism. And so I read a lot of those documents that the organization produced.

Duncan McCargo [00:14:30]

So to some extent you were in effect, almost embedded within the organization. And was there a kind of participant observation element to all this as well as the interviews themselves?

Tim Mann [00:14:40]

Yeah. And so I guess one thing that I didn't mention was I was attending a lot of their press conferences and their training activities with members of the community. So, yes, I tried to be as involved as I could for that six months plus.

Duncan McCargo [00:14:58]

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's obviously just the kind of research methods that I personally tend to like. And we have a number of people in and around NIAS doing research in this sort of way, which is highly immersive and really at the cutting edge of what's happening. One dilemma for a lot of organizations and fields of this kind is just how much to try and work with government agencies, politicians, power holders, and how far to maintain an essentially critical, oppositional detached stance. Was that an issue also for LBA?

Tim Mann

That was really major focus of my research. So as you can imagine, under the authoritarian government, under the authoritarian New Order, there was little to no engagement with the state. But after the new order fell in 1998. LBA had to grapple with the idea of how much it wanted to collaborate with the state. When the state was more democratic, they had to confront these questions about is the state to be partnered with? Should we continue to oppose it? And that did lead to almost like an identity crisis in the organization in those initial years after the fall of the new order. That's not to say that they have completely rejected engagement with the state. LBH was very deeply involved in the formulation of the 2011 legal aid law. So they worked quite closely with the government and legislators to formulate this law, which established a government funded system of legal aid, loosely based on LBH's model of legal aid. So the government has now agreed to reimburse civil society legal aid providers for legal aid offered to the poor. They've also in past years experimented with efforts to strengthen the capacity of state institutions. So LBH Jakarta, the Jakarta office, was involved in efforts to provide human rights training to police. But if you've been following Indonesia at all recently, over the past couple of years, you would know well about the complete failure of police reform since 1998. So these kind of experiences, and especially in light of the democratic regression that has occurred over the past 5 to 10 years, have really led LBH to develop a deeply pessimistic attitude about engaging with the government and legislature on reform. So democratic regression has seen them return to a really highly oppositional identity, similar to the kind of identity that they had under the new order. It's decided that being able to stand on the side of justice seekers is much more important than winning small concessions from the state that they believe are probably unlikely to be implemented anyway.

Tim Mann [00:18:07]

So it doesn't engage with the government to a great extent itself. But that's not to say that it is against its other colleagues or contemporaries in civil society doing that kind of closer engagement with the government. But if LBH is involved, it's usually part of a broader alliance rather than doing that work, engaging with the government directly themselves.

Duncan McCargo [00:18:36]

But there's a certain irony in the fact that 25 years on, from Indonesia's notional democratic transition, an organisation like this is reverting back to sort of slightly new order mode in the way that it engages with the state.

Tim Mann [00:18:50]

Yes, I think it's partly depressing, but also you can see that given it has this this legacy of opposition, it's almost like a natural position for it to take. In my more recent discussions with members of civil society, not just from LBH, a lot of civil society, is really talking about the restrictions that they face and talking about it as if it is almost similar to what was faced under the new order period. I had a rather depressing conversation recently where someone was saying to me that we really have to start thinking about things in the longer term now, thinking 5 to 10 years in advance, thinking about what was faced under the new order in the 1980s or so. So they're really feeling as though this Democratic progression has become deeply set in, and it's going to take a longer time to turn it around again.

Duncan McCargo [00:19:50]

Of course, Indonesia is going to be having another presidential election next year. So, can you speculate about the likely challenges for LBJ and others operating in the Indonesian human rights and criminal justice space going forward?

Tim Mann [00:20:04]

I think if we look at the three main candidates, none of them are really going to offer any kind of change to the status quo. I don't think things are going to become more repressive, but neither do I think that there is much chance of any improvement in the human rights and democracy situation with the three candidates that we have on offer.

Duncan McCargo [00:20:31]

During your time at NIAS, how do you intend to build on your previous work in the field? What is it that you're planning to write while you're here?

Tim Mann [00:20:38]

Yeah, so I would really love to use my time here to continue to work on some of the data that I collected through my PhD and supplement that with some new interviews. Really looking at how legal aid activists have responded to these more recent threats to democracy. So thinking particularly, yes, about the omnibus law on job creation and the regressive new criminal code that was passed at the end of last year. I'm really hoping to develop this into a book manuscript by the time I have finished my time here.

Duncan McCargo [00:21:18]

And for people who are intrigued by what they've been listening to and their curiosity is piqued, are there articles or outputs already available or coming out shortly for someone who wants to know more about your research?

Tim Mann [00:21:30]

I've got an article in the works. I have a very brief conversation article on LBA that if anyone's interested in an introduction to the organization, that's probably a rough introduction to the organization, but you may have to wait a bit longer for the journal article or the book.

Duncan McCargo [00:21:50]

Great. Well, we will post a link to that shorter piece from the conversation onto the blurb for this podcast so that people can get a little bit of insight and will be eagerly awaiting the next outcomes of your project. So Tim, thanks so much for sharing some of the ideas and issues you're working on related to human rights cause lawyering in Indonesia.

Tim Mann [00:22:12]

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Duncan.

Duncan McCargo [00:22:14]

I'm Duncan Mercado, director of Nias, and I've been in conversation with our new NIAS postdoc, Tim Man, who's working on Cause Lawyering and the Indonesian Foundation of Legal Institute, so, LBH. thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

Duncan McCargo [00:22:33]

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