The opening part was made into an open online lecture and attended by 50 persons, mostly lawyers from Indonesian NGOs. The opening speech was held by lawyers from the UK law firm Leigh Day, that has wide experience in taking human rights claims to court.
The rest of the workshop is focusing more on Indonesia’s domestic legal system, and is attended by 17 lawyers from the various regional offices of the Legal Aid Foundation.
Indonesian law guarantees human rights through the constitution, national laws and the ratifications of most international human rights treaties. Even so, human rights is rarely referred to explicitly by judges. The workshop attempts to address this by training lawyers to make more effective human rights claims in court. Simultanosly, other organisations are working to improve the human rights competence of the courts themselves, and the supreme court has recently made human rights part of the obligatory trainings that all judges must undergo. In spite of the general tendency noted above, that courts rarely uphold human rights, there have been some important exceptions, including several recent court decisions that have been based on explicit human rights arguments.
The workshop was originally intended to be one full week, but due to the necessary electronic format is has been spread over a longer time period, from 8 to 26 February. It is based on a previously developed training module, and consist of the following parts, each approximately three hours:
- Opening and public lecture
- Introduction and the methods of online learning
- HR litigation
- Legal reasoning
- Research and legal documentation
- In the courtroom (part I and II)
- Campaign
- Evaluation, reflection and closing