Indonesian Human Rights: Greater Protections since Reformasi?

By Jack Buckley

Abundant commentary exists on the impacts felt throughout the Indonesian archipelago since the resignation of former authoritarian ruler Suharto and the beginning of reformasi in 1998. In the field of human rights, however, there has been little effort to explain the processes facilitating increased human rights protections for Indonesian citizens today.

These human rights protections in Indonesia are not, however, experienced equally across the country. Various formal institutions have been established to promote human rights protections such as the freedom of expression, the freedom of association, and the freedom to choose a religion. These institutions include amendments to the Constitution and a national commission for human rights.

Except these formal institutions are regularly trumped by informal institutions in different regions of Indonesia, most notably in the outer islands dominated by centralised Jakarta policy-making and inter-regional rivalry. One such example in the earlier stages of reformasi is then President Megawati Sukarnoputri attempting to divide the Indonesian controlled territory in Papua into three separate provinces in an effort to engineer the electoral status of the restless region. This move backfired when the Indonesian Supreme Court struck down the legislation in 2003 and controversy continued as violent local protests over the freedoms of expression and association persist.

In today’s Indonesia, captivated by monitoring the successes and failures of the reform-minded Joko Widodo administration, many of the freedoms and rights experienced by everyday Indonesians are determined by the increasing democratisation of formal government institutions. Once formal government institutions operate with transparency and accountability, the ability for corrupt officials to exploit existing shortcomings will disappear and informal institutions which perpetuate human rights abuses will most likely follow suit.

Broad efforts to achieve the democratisation goal are seen globally and in the efforts of the Australian aid program to assist bureaucratic reform in Indonesia. A 2013 report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights addressed the centrality of good institutional governance in achieving human rights protections with recommendations pertinent to Indonesia’s human rights development such as “centrally formulated policy should take into account the needs of citizens throughout the country.” What’s more, Australia’s aid investment plan to Indonesia highlights the need to improve public sector governance. Evidence of this is seen in the cooperation of Indonesian and Australian government ministries in the Bureaucratic Reform Initiative funded for AUD$11.8 million over the past five years.

The quality of human rights protections throughout Indonesia, including the outer islands, can only be assessed once the necessary conditions for formal institutions to protect these rights are in place. The improved delivery of public services may be the linchpin for success in this space and look set to improve under the Widodo administration’s commitment to bureaucratic reform and reform more broadly. However, reformasi period reforms to human rights remain incomplete and are still disappointingly applied in the outer islands where violations persist and some of Indonesia’s previous ethnic and religious issues may yet again be revived.

*Jack Buckley is a Masters candidate at the Australian National University and can be contacted at jackbuckley@live.com

These 'people smugglers' need an apology from all of us

By Ross Taylor

It hardly made any news.

An Indonesian ‘people smuggler’ last week successfully appealed to the full bench of the Australian Federal Court to have his conviction eventually quashed.

This particular people smuggler served two years in a maximum security prison in Perth (Hakea Prison) and Albany for smuggling asylum seekers from Indonesia to Christmas Island in 2010.

He has told stories of how he was denied the services of an interpreter, how he was stripped naked on numerous occasions, being chained by his hands and feet and being locked-down from 7am until 7pm on most nights.

This prisoner, at the time the offence occurred, was 13 years of age.

Ali Yasmin, now 19 years of age, was one of some 50 children recruited by people smuggling syndicates in Indonesia to work on boats as deck and kitchen hands at the peak of the asylum seeker debacle.

These children, many of whom were pre-pubescent, were from remote and very poor villages in the east of the sprawling archipelago to our north, with their families being offered up to $200.00 for the services of their sons for ostensibly two weeks work on board a fishing boat.

In an area where many people live on $70.00 per month, the offer was highly attractive, given that many of these kids worked on boats routinely.

The then Labor Government, desperate to be tough on people smugglers, had introduced mandatory sentencing for anyone carrying or assisting in the transport of asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. They did not intend to catch young children in this net, but that’s what can happen when poorly thought-out legislation is enacted by a government under enormous political pressure.

Ali Yasmin, like a number of his friends, was convicted and sentenced to jail in an adult maximum security prison here in WA. This was despite a doctor certifying that he was pre-pubescent and documents being provided to confirm the age of this young boy.

To think that a country such as Australia could have incarcerated children in this way – alongside drug dealers, paedophiles and bank robbers – and subject them to strip searches, lock downs and no access to their families back in Indonesia, is almost unthinkable for a nation that prides itself as being decent,  caring and respectful of human rights.

It was only through the Indonesia Institute, several leading media groups (including The West Australian) and human rights advocates, was the then Gillard Government forced to release these children and send them back to where they rightfully belonged: with their parents.

Ali Yasmin, being represented by human rights lawyers, last week won a ruling that now forces the Australian Attorney-General, George Brandos, to exercise his ‘legal duty’ to refer the boys appeal to the WA Court of Appeal where the team is hopeful the conviction will be quashed.

That a nation such as Australia knowingly allowed foreign children to be locked-up for years with hardened adult criminals leaves a stain on all of us. But to now force children like Yasmin to ‘fight’ in the courts to have his conviction overturned is appalling.

Our new PM, Malcolm Turnbull, should move immediately to have all the convictions of these children quashed, and to also make a formal apology on behalf of Australia to their families for the inhuman treatment of children who should never have been placed in our maximum security prisons in the first place.

Ross Taylor AM is the President of the WA-based Indonesia Institute (Inc)

October 2015