Categories
Development Human Rights Indigenous Peoples Indonesia

Declared – Not Acquired

I am planning to do a field research on the negotiations of human rights in the context of agricultural modernisation in Merauke, Papua, next year. In preparation for this visit, I have written a paper that addresses the complexity, or cornucopia, of laws in Indonesia regarding food, food security, and general food law. I added a small case study on hunger in Yahukimo to illustrate my argument.

Abstract:

The right of everyone to be free from hunger is recognised as fundamental in the international human rights laws. This means that states have the obligation to take immediate measures against this adversity. However, optimism towards state compliance in this regard is challenged by the intricacies in state laws, regulations and practices that buttress the measures to eradicate hunger. This chapter depicts the complexity of addressing hunger as a violation of the right to food in Indonesia. Based from a comparative analysis of the Indonesian human rights law, general food law and disaster management law as well as an examination of state measures against the hunger in Yahukimo, Papua, the chapter highlights that one can expect little when normative points of the right to food are being used as the standards of enforcement. In reality, people’s actual command to food commodity is being governed according to the prevailing struggles and relationships of people, context and power.

This article will be published in the book ‘Governing Food Security: Law, Politics and the Right to Food’, which I co-edited with my colleague, Dr. O. Hospes.

Categories
Governance Human Rights Indigenous Peoples

Legal Complexity and the Right to Food

For the Critical Legal Theory Conference, organized by Utrecht University this year, I presented a paper on ‘Legal Complexity and the Right to Food’ in the Methodology Panel.

The paper is set out to analyse what it means to study state obligations to progressive realisation of the right to food from the perspective legal complexity. This perspective studies law not in isolation, rather in the existence of multiple legal systems at socio-political space of states. The paper highlights that employing legal complexity, particularly with its understanding on interlegality and space, may enable one to gain insights in the ways that states measure their commitment to carry their obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to food.

If interested you can download the paper on my SSRN page.

I am planning to develop this idea into a publication in an article peer-reviewed journal.