Legal Support Structures and the Realisation of Muslim Women's Rights in Indonesia

Access to courts in Indonesia is remarkably low. An estimated 90 per cent of disputes are handled through informal mechanisms (World Bank, 2008; Clark and Stephens, 2011), raising doubts about whether there is any prospect of the reach and efficacy of Indonesian law ever being expanded to facilitate judicial protection of human rights and the rights of women. This article considers this issue and places it in the context of a number of other factors, such as the critique of human rights as a western import and the influence of the state, Islam and feminism on women's rights in Indonesia. Given gender relations in the current political and legal environment, I argue that "support structures for legal mobilisation" (SSLMs) provide a crucial link to the community that enables the exercise of women's rights. The article focuses on the example of one such SSLM. PEKKA is a national NGO that leverages international support in its efforts to empower women and facilitate access to courts - including religious courts, which determine access to government social safety nets and many other entitlements for many Indonesian women and their families.