Encouraging Access to Justice for Indonesian Migrant Workers in Malaysia: The Need of Engaging Legal Aid Organizations in ASEAN

Ridwan Wahyudi; Hamzah Jusoh

Encouraging Access to Justice for Indonesian Migrant Workers in Malaysia: The Need of Engaging Legal Aid Organizations in ASEAN

Ridwan Wahyudi, Hamzah Jusoh

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the problems of Indonesian migrant workers and how legal aid organizations overcome that issue. The most of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia experience a range of human insecurity, living under threatening circumstances such as being victims of violence or physical abused and encounter severe deprivation of basic needs. Otherwise, some difficulties arise in the law enforcement to tackle those problems, because of the lack of access to justice in the legal framework. Therefore, the need of instruments to acknowledge, to provide and to implement the access to justice through legal aid assistance are important to secure social protection of migrant workers. This study elaborates the development and the role of legal aid organizations network concerning on access to justice for Indonesian migrant workers. The research method is using purposive sampling for qualitative data collection with content of analysis technique. The result study exposures that legal aid organizations have been handling several cases of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia by using pro-bono lawyer. However, there are problems of conducting advocacy; the lack of information in migrant workers about legal aid assistance because of the hindrance by their user, and the lack of good advocacy mechanism in legal institutions to empowerment function of access to justice. Thus, the need to strengthening network of migrant workers trade union, civil society and community; particularly in ASEAN countries is an important thing to start enforcing access to justice and ensuring human security for Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia.

Keywords

Indonesian migrant workers; human security; access to justice; legal aid organizations networking; Malaysia; ASEAN

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