The Homepage of LBH APIK in Indonesian.
Linked with Nursyahbani Katjasungkana – Indonesia.
Sorry, there exists an english website, but I cannot reach it for the moment. What I can get is the following:
Based on the analysis of the said legal system and in addition to the reality that the existing legal aid does not consider the issue of women as a significant human rights issue, Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, one of the founders and the director of APIK formulated a concept for legal aid called legal aid structural gender. By using the feminist legal theory approach (that includes unsure women as significant elements for legal changes) and in order to explain its objective as a tool for social transformation, its name was changed to gender and transformative legal aid.[4] Based on this concept, APIK formulated its mission to correct unjust gender relations that are the basis of the legal system and to eradicate structural poverty that imprisons the life of the majority of the Indonesian women.
In order to attain these objectives, APIK formulated strategic plans with the following goals:
- Provide legal aid to poor women, particularly women workers (including house maids) and women who experience various forms of violence.
- Conduct mass educations and trainings particularly for law enforcers : police, prosecutors, judges, and lawyers, including paralegal trainings.
- Conduct research and review public policies that have a big impact to the position and role of women.
- Document cases, particularly cases on violence against women and other landmark cases, as well as publish various legal information that were already analyze with a gender perspective.
- Conduct networking with women organizations and other human rights organizations here and abroad to support advocacy work.
- Strengthen the institution of APIK in terms of human resources, finances, and other work infrastructures.
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[1] APIK is membership organization. Every members of APIK are obliged to establish a legal aid institution in their respective areas. At present, APIK has 30 members who are lawyers in general.
[2] The basic concept of the structural legal aid is to use legal cases as instruments to obtain the legal resources of the society so that they can use the law to change the legal system and the social system that makes these groups in the society economically and politically poor. For further elaborations on this concept, see Nasution & Lubis in HM. Scoble and LS Wiseberg (eds) Access to Justice : The Struggle fo Human Rights in South East Asia (1985).
[3] In Indonesia, since the 60’s, there is a legal aid institution that concentrates on providing legal aids in Courts. This type of legal aid – that is also referred to as court room model, are mostly developed by mass organizations, political parties, private faculties of law, as well as the state, and women organizations.
[4] Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, who worked for 13 years and became the director of Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Jakarta (Legal Aid Institution Jakarta), added the gender perspective in the concept of the structural legal aid and called it Legal Aid Structural Gender. The writer is grateful to Pof. Dr. Sylvia Tiwon from the University of Berkeley who provided valuable inputs and criticisms to the initial concept that was formulated in1994 and later applied by APIK in 1995.