Article | Litigating land conflicts in Indonesia

New article written by Ward Berenschot et al. titled ‘The perils of legal formalism: Litigating land conflicts in Indonesia’, in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.

KITLV researcher Ward Berenschot collaborated with Daniel Peterson and Adriaan Bedner to analyse the capacity of Indonesia’s legal system to address the many land conflicts between companies and rural Indonesians. Relying on 18 court judgments, they explore the legal strategies of those communities and individuals threatened by dispossession that have opted to litigate, as well as the protracted nature of the appeals process and the typically formalistic nature of the courts’ verdicts. It is found that judges rarely rule on the merits of a case; rather, they adopt a formalist approach to the law, which prioritises strict procedural correctness. The primary obstacle to substantive judicial outcomes and resolutions where land disputes are litigated is not Indonesia’s uncertain land law regime, but the disconnect between the competencies of lawyers representing communities in court and the excessively formalist approach of the judiciary.

No Comments

Post A Comment